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1919 
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COMMEMORATION 



OF THE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

FEBRUARY 22, 1819 



UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE 

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS 

HELD IN NEW YORK FEBRUARY 19-22, 1919 




BookJL- 

PRESENTED BY / 






COMMEMORATION 
OF THE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



COMMEMORATION 
OF THE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

POET, SCHOLAR, DIPLOMAT 

BORN IN CAMBRIDGE, MASS., FEBRUARY 22, 1819 
DIED IN CAMBRIDGE, AUGUST 12, 1891 



HELD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE 

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS 
IN NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 19-22, 1919 




PUBLISHED FOR THE ACADEMY 

NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1919 
Cojey ^ 






■v 



Copyright, 1919, by the 
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS 



Institution 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Portrait of Lowell Frontispiece 

Prefatory Note and List of Guests .... vii 

Events: 

Reception by President Nicholas Murray 
Butler, of Columbia University, and Mrs. 
Butler 3 

Dinner at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel ... 5 

Speakers: 

elihu ROOT 
john galsworthy 
maurice hutton 
brander matthews 

Representation of " Dear Brutus " at the 
Empire Theatre, with Letter from Sir 
James M. Barrie 29 

Literary Exercises, Ritz-Carlton Hotel . . 33 

Speakers: 

william milligan sloane 
barrett wendell 
alfred noyes 
stephen butler leacock 
edgar lee masters 

SAMUEL MC CHORD CROTHERS 

[v] 



Supplementary Events: 



[vi] 

PAGE 



Representation of " Washington " at the 

Theatre du Vieux Colombier .... 77 

Luncheon by The Pilgrims at the Union 

League Club 79 

Luncheon by the National Institute of Arts 

and Letters 81 

Ode on the Hundredth Anniversary of the 
Birth of James Russell Lowell, by 
Duncan Campbell Scott 83 



List of Members of the Academy 85 



PREFATORY NOTE AND LIST OF GUESTS 

This Commemoration was suggested by Mr. Nicholas 
Murray Butler to his Fellow-Directors of the Academy, with 
the two-fold object of celebrating the Centenary of Mr. 
Lowell as an American man of letters, and of accentuating 
in the public mind the power and unity of the literatures of 
the English-speaking peoples. Many prominent authors and 
statesmen of Great Britain and Canada were invited as guests 
of the Academy. Those who accepted and were present were : 

FROM GREAT BRITAIN 

Sir Henry Babington Smith, K. C. B. 

Acting High Commissioner to the United States 

John Galsworthy, Esq. 

C. Lewis Hind, Esq. 

Robert Nichols, Esq. 

Alfred Noyes, C. B. E., Litt. D. 

FROM THE DOMINION OF CANADA 

James Cappon, F. R. S. C, LL. D. 

Pelham Edgar, F. R. S. C, Ph. D. 

Sir Robert Alexander Falconer, K. C. M. G., LL. D. 

Maurice Hutton, LL. D. 

Stephen Butler Leacock, F. R. S. C., Ph. D. 

Archibald M'Kellar MacMechan, F. R. S. C. 

Duncan Campbell Scott, F. R. S. C. 

FROM AUSTRALIA 
Henry Yule Braddon, M. L. C. 



COMMEMORATION 
OF THE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



RECEPTION BY PRESIDENT AND MRS. BUTLER 

At their home, 60 Morningside Drive 

On the evening of February 19th a reception was given at 
their home, 60 Morningside Drive, by President Nicholas 
Murray Butler, of Columbia University, and Mrs. Butler, in 
honor of the Academy and its visiting guests, to which 
were invited the members of the National Institute of Arts 
and Letters, and a large number of representative men and 
women of New York. 



DINNER AT THE RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL 

A dinner of the Academy in honor of the visiting guests 
was given at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Thursday evening, 
February 20th. A portrait in oils of Mr. Lowell, made from 
life by Mrs. Dora Wheeler Keith, courteously loaned by the 
Harvard Club, was an interesting feature of the occasion. 
Hon. Elihu Root, member of the Academy, presided and 
opened his address by offering the toasts that follow: 

Ladies and gentlemen, please fill your glasses, which is 
still permitted, and raise them, which is indicated by high 
authority; I give you the health of the President of the 
United States ! 

(Drinking of the Toast) 

Mr. Root : Ladies and gentlemen — the King ! 
(Drinking of the Toast) 



is) 



MR. ELIHU ROOT 

MEMBER OF THE ACADEMY 

Gentlemen of the Academy, ladies, our guests: When that 
stout English navigator, Hendrik Hudson, sailed the Half 
Moon into this harbor three hundred and odd years ago, the 
height of land to the north was inhabited by a League of 
Nations — Indian nations, five great powers of the aboriginal 
world, bound together by mutual covenants. By force of 
their organization they held sway over all the savage tribes 
from the Penobscot to the Mississippi, from Carolina to the 
Great Lakes of the Northwest. Their union did not depend 
solely upon the binding force of agreements. Across the 
lines of national or tribal division ran the lines of clanship. 
In each of the five Nations the members of the clan bearing 
the totems of the bear, the deer, the wolf, the beaver, were 
brethren of the members of the same clan bearing the same 
totem in each of the other nations. All the members of the 
clans were bound together by the traditions of brotherhood 
and sympathy in the most sacred ideals of Indian faith. 
The warp and woof of these double ties of political loyalty 
to the nation, and personal loyalty to brotherhood in the clan 
created a fabric of so firm a texture, of such quality of resis- 
tance against all tendencies toward disunion and dissension 
that the League of the Iroquois seemed destined to become 
the origin of a new civilization until the whites came with 
superior numbers and applied science, and a religion not 
perfect in its restraint. 

The American Academy of Arts and Letters welcomes the 
brethren of its clan from across the boundaries of Britain and 
Canada, in the American Republic, with cheerful confidence 
that the ties of brotherhood in literature, of common tradi- 
tions and sympathies and ideals may bind more firmly to- 
gether in harmony of purpose and of action the several na- 
tions whose sons we are. 



[7] 

We have come together to celebrate the One Hundredth 
Anniversary of the birth of James Russell Lowell, American 
author of English blood, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
February 22, 1819, a descendant of Percival Lowell, who 
came from Bristol, England, to Newburyport, Massachusetts, 
in the year 1639, raised by his pen to be Minister representing 
the United States in Great Britain, and, thereafter, by natural 
sequence, representing the best thought and feeling of Great 
Britain to the people of the United States, a graduate of 
Harvard, Doctor of Civil Laws of Oxford, Doctor of Laws of 
Cambridge, sometime Rector of the University of St. Andrews, 
sometime Professor of Belles-Lettres and lecturer at Har- 
vard, a gentleman of breeding and manners, a democrat of 
conviction and practice, a poet of noble thought and charm 
of expression, an essayist of insight and felicity, humorist, 
wit, satirist, a man of courage, of vision, worthy of trust, 
kindly, lovable, exhibiting the best qualities of his race. 
He illustrated in his own person, his character, his life, the 
essential unity of the race. He belongs to all of us. No one 
of us can say to another, "We celebrate your Lowell." We 
all of us are celebrating our Lowell, and when we honor him 
we are all honoring the great qualities of character and 
achievement wrought out in the long progress of the genera- 
tions of the peoples from whom we spring. He was not of 
the greatest, with fame transcendent for all time, but he had 
his marked and conspicuous place in the long succession of 
men of genius from Piers Plowman and Chaucer down to the 
last great rendezvous with death in the battle lines of France 
and Flanders, the seers through whom the nobility of the race 
found voice. 

He saw his Country in one of those strange lethargies 
which come at times to all peoples under the septic poisoning 
of prosperity. The compromise between freedom and slav- 
ery which made the American Union possible had endured 
so long, and had been followed by such vast material success 
that the general vision of his Countrymen had become ob- 



[8] 

scured, right and wrong had grown to seem to them strangely 
alike, and, when the vital question whether America should 
be slave or free demanded a decision, it found a people with 
consciences asleep, confused amid questions of expediency, 
halting upon timid counsels. Then Lowell spoke for the 
better nature, for the deep underlying nature of his people. 
Now in stately and noble verse, and now in quaint and homely 
exaggeration of Yankee dialect, with the power of intense con- 
viction, with pathos, and wit and satire, and intuitive under- 
standing of their natures, he reached the hearts and minds of 
his countrymen; he drove away the mists that obscured their 
sight, he awakened the memories of their past, their traditions, 
their ideals, their sense of justice, their love of liberty, and, 
under his influence more than that of any other save Lin- 
coln alone, the soul of America rose above its timid material- 
ism, and, by sacrifice and suffering, redeemed America for 
freedom. 

When we come to honor James Russell Lowell, we do more 
than honor the man, we honor literature, the interpreter 
of the Divine spirit in man. Will anyone question that 
there is an essential unity of spirit served by that great com- 
pany of poets and philosophers, historians and essayists and 
dramatists, the seers and prophets from all our lands, who 
by written word have destroyed the false by showing the 
truth, and driven out what was base by revealing what was 
noble; throughout the long struggle for ordered freedom 
wedded to justice, for truth, for liberty of thought, of re- 
ligion, of expression and of action — the hard struggle through 
all the centuries from before Magna Carta until now Britain, 
her ancient kingdoms, her dominions and colonies, and her 
mighty offspring of the West, inspired by a single conception 
of public right and personal liberty, are together the chief 
hope and bulwark of the peace and liberty of the world. 
We honor that great company when we pay our tribute to 
Lowell, their brother 

If anyone does question, let him tell me how it is that for 



[9] 

thousands of miles from the place where we now meet, south 
to the Gulf and the Rio Grande, north to the Arctic, west to 
the Pacific, more than a hundred million people, drawn from 
all the races upon earth, order their lives according to the 
course of the common law of England, base their political 
faith on the principles of liberty and justice established against 
unwilling governments by the Commons of England, and 
embodied in the limitations of official power in the American 
Constitutions; rear their children upon the nursery rhymes 
whose origins are lost in the mists of the Saxon Heptarchy; 
form their religion from the texts of the English Bible; make 
their laws, transact their business and carry on their social 
intercourse in the speech of our Spenser and Shakespeare and 
Milton. Here was power, the most tremendous formative 
power the world has seen since the prime of the Roman Empire. 
It was the power of the unity of the single spirit of the com- 
posite race, wrought out in the speech and life of humble folk, 
made manifest and guarded and handed down from genera- 
tion to generation by the Men of English Letters, whose 
brotherhood of common service and common inspiration we 
celebrate this night. 

All over the world the shock of universal war has broken 
the bonds of habit. Old postulates are denied, old customs 
abjured, old faiths forgotten. New dreams beckon. Nations 
tread unaccustomed paths that may lead to a millennium, or 
back into barbarism. From every part the peoples call to 
one another for sympathy and guidance and help. Deep 
calls unto deep. The fateful question: "What ideals shall 
rule the world ?" hangs in the balance. 

We join together for greater courage and hope and power, 
to the end that the ideals we have inherited and served may 
endure and prevail. We rest in faith that 

"The single note 
From that deep chord which Hampden smote 
Will vibrate to the doom." 



[ io] 

Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to join me in a toast 
to the English-speaking peoples of the world — the Children of 
the Lion I 

(Drinking of the Toast) 

Ladies and gentlemen, if this were an asylum for the 
feeble-minded, I should introduce the first speaker of the 
evening with appropriate explanation; but it is not, and I 
present Mr. John Galsworthy. 



MR. JOHN GALSWORTHY 

Mr. Chairman: I do not think I can even try to express 
my sense of the honour done me, and the embarrassment I 
feel standing here, innocent of the higher culture, and so 
poor a representative of my country's literature — on this 
august occasion. 

We celebrate tonight the memory of a great man of Let- 
ters. What strikes me most about that glorious group of 
New England writers — Emerson and Longfellow, Hawthorne, 
Whittier, Thoreau, Motley, Holmes, and Lowell — is a cer- 
tain measure and magnanimity. They were rare men and 
fine writers; of a temper simple and unafraid. 

I confess to thinking more of James Russell Lowell as a 
critic and master of prose than as a poet. His single-hearted 
enthusiasm for Letters had a glowing quality which made it a 
guiding star for the frail barque of Culture. His humour, 
breadth of view, sagacity, and the all-round character of his 
activities has hardly been equalled in your country. Not so 
great a thinker or poet as Emerson, not so creative as Haw- 
thorne, so original in philosophy and life as Thoreau, so racy 
and quaint as Holmes, he ran the gamut of those qualities 
as none of the others did; and as critic and analyst of litera- 
ture surpassed them all. 

But I cannot hope to add anything of value to your esti- 
mate and praise of Lowell — critic, humorist, poet, editor, 
reformer, man of Letters, man of State affairs. I may per- 
haps be permitted, however, to remind you of two sayings of 
his: "I am never lifted up to any peak of vision — but that, 
when I look down in hope to see some valley of the Beautiful 
Mountains, I behold nothing but blackened ruins; and the 
moans of the downtrodden the world over. . . . Then it 
seems as if my heart would break in pouring out one glorious 

[u] 



[ 12 ] 

song that should be the gospel of Reform, full of consolation and 
strength to the oppressed. . . . That way my madness lies." 
That was one side of the youthful Lowell, the generous righter 
of wrongs, the man. And this other saying: "The English- 
speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided 
enthusiasts of the plains of Shinar; for as the mixture of many 
bloods seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern 
races, so has the mingling of divers speeches given them a 
language which is perhaps the noblest vehicle of poetic thought 
that ever existed." That was the other side of Lowell, the 
enthusiast for Letters, and that the feeling he had about our 
language. 

I am wondering indeed, Mr. Chairman, what those men 
who in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries were 
welding the English language would think if they could visit 
this hall tonight, if suddenly we saw them sitting among us in 
their monkish dress, their homespun, or their bright armour, 
having come from a greater Land even than America — the 
Land of the Far Shades. What expression should we see on 
the dim faces of them, as they took in the marvellous fact 
that the instrument of speech they forged in the cottages, 
courts, cloisters, and castles of their little misty island had 
become the living speech of half the world, and the second 
tongue for all the nations of the other half ! For even so it is, 
now — this English language, which they made and Shake- 
speare crowned, which you speak and we speak, and men 
speak under the Southern Cross, and unto the Arctic Seas ! 

I do not think, Mr. Chairman, that you Americans and we 
English are any longer strikingly alike in physical type or 
general characteristics, no more than I think there is much 
resemblance between yourselves and the Australians. Our 
link is now but community of language — and the infinity which 
this connotes. 

Perfected language — and ours and yours had come to 
flower before white men began to seek these shores — is so 
much more than a medium through which to exchange ma- 



[ 13 ] 

terial commodities; it is cement of the spirit, mortar linking 
the bricks of our thought into a single structure of ideals and 
laws, painted and carved with the rarities of our fancy, the 
manifold forms of Beauty and Truth. We who speak Ameri- 
can and you who speak English are conscious of a community 
which no differences can take from us. Perhaps the very 
greatest result of the grim years we have just been passing 
through is the promotion of our common tongue to the posi- 
tion of the universal language. The importance of the 
English-speaking peoples is now such that the educated man 
in every country will perforce, as it were, acquire a knowledge 
of our speech. The second-language problem, in my judg- 
ment, has been solved. Numbers, and geographical and 
political accident have decided a question which I think will 
never seriously be reopened, unless madness descends on us 
and we speakers of English fight among ourselves. That fate 
I, at least, cannot see haunting the future. 

Lowell says in one of his earlier writings: "We are the 
furthest from wishing to see what many are so ardently pray- 
ing for, namely, a National Literature; for the same mighty 
lyre of the human heart answers the touch of the master in 
all ages and in every clime, and any literature in so far as it is 
national is diseased in so much as it appeals to some climatic 
peculiarity rather than to universal nature. ,, That is very 
true, but good fortune has now made of our English speech 
a medium of internationality. 

Henceforth you and we are the inhabitants and guardians 
of a great Spirit-City, to which the whole world will make 
pilgrimage. They will make that pilgrimage primarily be- 
cause our City is a market-place. It will be for us to see 
that they who come to trade remain to worship. 

Mr. Chairman, what is it we seek in this motley of our 
lives , to what end do we ply the multifarious traffic of civilisa- 
tion? Is it that we may become rich and satisfy a material 
caprice ever growing with the opportunity of satisfaction? 
Is it that we may, of set and conscious purpose, always be 



[ 14] 

getting the better of one another? Is ft even, that of no 
sort of conscious purpose we may pound the roads of life at 
top speed, and blindly use up our little energies? I cannot 
think so. Surely, in dim sort we are trying to realize human 
happiness, trying to reach a far-off goal of health and kind- 
liness and beauty; trying to live so that those qualities 
which make us human beings — the sense of proportion, the 
feeling for beauty, pity, and the sense of humour — should be 
ever more exalted above the habits and passions that we share 
with the tiger, the ostrich, and the ape. 

And so, I would ask what will become of all our recon- 
struction in these days if it be informed and guided solely 
by the spirit of the market-place? Do trade, material 
prosperity, and the abundance of creature comforts guarantee 
that we advance towards our real goal? Material com- 
fort in abundance is no bad thing; I confess to a considerable 
regard for it. But for true progress it is but a flighty con- 
sort. I can well see the wreckage from the world-storm 
completely cleared away, the fields of life ploughed and 
manured, and yet no wheat grown there which can feed the 
spirit of man, and help its stature! Lest we suffer such a 
disillusion as that, what powers and influence can we exert? 
There is one, at least: The proper and exalted use of this 
great and splendid instrument, our common language. In 
a sophisticated world speech is action, words are deeds; we 
cannot watch our winged words too closely. Let us at 
least make our language the instrument of Truth; prune it 
of lies and extravagance, of perversions and all the calculated 
battery of partizanship; train ourselves to such sobriety of 
speech and penmanship, that we come to be trusted at home 
and abroad; so making our language the medium of honesty 
and fair-play that meanness, violence, sentimentality, and 
self-seeking become strangers in our lands. Great and evil 
is the power of the lie, of the violent saying, and of the cal- 
culated appeal to base or dangerous motive; let us, then, 
make them fugitives among us, outcast from our speech ! 



[ 15 ] 

I have often thought during these past years what an 
ironical eye Providence must have been turning on national 
propaganda — on all the disingenuous breath which has been 
issued to order, and all those miles of patriotic writings duti- 
fully produced in each country, to prove to other countries 
that they are its inferiors ! A very little wind will blow those 
ephemeral sheets into the limbo of thin air. Already they 
are decomposing, soon they will be dust. Mr. Chairman, 
to my thinking there are only two forms of national propa- 
ganda, two sorts of evidence of a country's worth, which defy 
the cross-examination of Time : The first and most important 
is the rectitude and magnanimity of a country's conduct; its 
determination not to take advantage of the weakness of other 
countries, nor to tolerate tyranny within its own borders. 
And the other lasting form of propaganda is the work of the 
thinker and the artist, of men whose unbidden, unfettered 
hearts are set on the expression of Truth and Beauty as best 
they can perceive them. Such propaganda the old Greeks 
left behind them, to the imperishable glory of their Land. 
By such propaganda Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, Dante, 
St. Francis, Cervantes, Spinoza, Montaigne, Racine, Chau- 
cer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kant, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Emer- 
son, Lowell — a thousand and one more, have exalted their 
countries in the sight of all, and advanced the stature of 
mankind. 

You may have noticed in life, Mr. Chairman, that when 
we assure others of our virtue and the extreme rectitude of 
our conduct we make on them but a sorry impression. If 
on the other hand we chance to perform some just act or 
kindness, of which they hear, or to produce a beautiful work 
which they can see, we become exalted in their estimation 
though we did not seek to be. And so it is with countries. 
They may proclaim their powers from the housetops — they 
will but convince the wind; but let their acts be just, their 
temper humane, the speech and writings of their peoples 
sober, the work of their thinkers and their artists true and 



beautiful — and those countries shall be sought after and 
esteemed. 

We, who possess in common the English language — "best 
result of the confusion of tongues" Lowell called it — that 
most superb instrument for the making of word-music, the 
telling of the truth, and the expression of the imagination, 
may well remember this : that, in the use we make of it, in 
the breadth, justice, and humanity of our thoughts, the 
vigour, restraint, clarity, and beauty of the setting we give 
to them, we have the greatest chance to make our countries 
lovely and beloved, to further the happiness of mankind, and 
to keep immortal the priceless comradeship between us. 



PROFESSOR MAURICE HUTTON 

Mr. Root, members of the Academy, and guests : I have the 
great honor this evening to represent Canada at this meeting 
in honor of Lowell, and I will begin, therefore, by quoting 
Lowell and one other poet. Canada, after four and a half 
anxious years of war, greets today her allies, the United 
States and Great Britain, — like Homer's Andromache, 
"smiling through her tears," or, in the language of Lowell 
about Huldah, 

" A kind o' smily round the lips, 
And teary round the lashes." 

It is impossible to be present at a gathering of this sort 
without a certain sense of contradiction. We here, I take it, 
recognize, as the previous speakers have said, that Great 
Britain, Canada and the United States are so absolutely one 
in all their interests that to say so is not a truth but a truism. 
It is but to say what Lowell thought and it is but to say 
what was thought by that friend of Lowell, that other poet, 
the poet who Lowell said was in some respects the poet of 
the Nineteenth Century, the poet of Oxford, Arthur Hugh 
Clough. It is seventy years ago since Clough proposed that, 
which still remains on the whole a poet's dream, a transferable 
citizenship common to all Americans, Canadians and British, 
the sort of citizenship which Lowell exercised when he was 
Rector of the British University of St. Andrews. And yet 
there is a certain sense of contradiction, ladies and gentle- 
men, because, when we who feel this unity leave our univer- 
sities and our academic banquets and go out into the cold 
street and meet the colder man in the street, we are aware 
at once of a sudden fall in temperature, spiritual as well as 
thermometric. We recognize that the academic class does 
not in this age represent, as much as sometimes it has done, 

[17] 



[ i'8 ] 

the governing class. And because it is so, and because we do 
not represent any longer the governing class so entirely, 
therefore, it was that your President, himself an ex-president 
of a university and sharing the academic feeling, found it so 
hard and long a task to bring the governing class of this 
country into sympathy with the feelings of the academic 
class and incidentally with the feelings of Canada and Great 
Britain. And, therefore, in Canada, for a time, we did not quite 
understand him, and we thought his mind was still moving in 
those college halls where all questions at issue are academic 
questions, are really questions where there is no difference 
except in opinion, where every man is an honorable man and 
a peace-loving man and a truth-loving man, and where, if one 
can talk of invective and attack, at any rate the invective and 
attack has always to be interpreted in a Pickwickian sense, 
where the love is always real and the hate is, so to speak, 
only Platonic. 

We thought that the President was still moving in that 
enchanted air, where all controversies are, as they are in col- 
lege halls, merely matters of misunderstanding and mistake, 
born of the brevity of life, of the greater brevity of human 
temper and the eternal ambiguities of language. And so 
we thought that he was feeling as often he must have felt in 
his college halls; that all tempests, even the tempests across 
the sea, were only tempests in a teapot; were only cases of 
pot and kettle, to put it more coarsely. For, after all, pot 
and kettle, of course, do affect vitally the qualities of tea, 
and are, one or the other of them, responsible for the spoiling 
of the contents of the teacup; and, besides, of course, his- 
torically, tea has always been a question at issue between 
Great Britain and the United States, and a teacup is really, 
therefore, the historical symbol of our differences. So we 
thought he was still feeling that the mighty cataclysm of Eur- 
ope was only another case of academic teacup tempest, an- 
other case of academic pot and kettle controversy. We did 
not adequately realize that, like Lincoln, he was patiently 



[ i9] 

playing for time, in order to bring the governing classes of his 
country round to his own point of view. 

Our three nations, when they do not absolutely agree, are 
always mediating one with another. Great Britain medi- 
ates between Canada and the United States, and not always 
to Canada's immediate satisfaction, when we lose, through 
Great Britain's mediation, "quelques arpents de neige" and 
certain stretches and leagues of salt water in Alaska and the 
Yukon. And Canada is always mediating between the 
United States and Great Britain, when, out of her abounding 
sympathy with American ways of thought, she interprets your 
thoughts to the statesmen of the old mother country. And 
the United States is always mediating between Canada and 
Great Britain, albeit unconsciously, unintentionally, involun- 
tarily, when, by your very existence and your portentous 
strength, you suggest to Canadian statesmen that they would 
better come to terms with British statesmen and with British 
prejudices, even while they are, it may be, "in the way," 
lest a worse thing befall them. 

We are no longer able to feel that the academic class is 
governing, but perhaps we could be a little nearer to making 
governments, if we were a little more vocal. It really is in- 
credible, ladies and gentlemen, that there is not even in 
Germany somewhere some small class of decent homely 
people, like ourselves, and agreeing in our point of view. It 
is incredible that Professors Forster and Nicolai and Prince 
Lichtnowsky and the author of "J'Accuse" and Herr Fernau 
are the only people in Germany who sympathize with our 
point of view. And yet there was never a word throughout 
the long four years of war to show that that class exerted 
itself at all, took any steps at all to make itself felt upon the 
action and the ideas of the man in the street and the military 
class and the governing class. It seems as if it was an inexor- 
able law of nature that academic people should have the de- 
fects of their qualities, and should be beyond measure timid, 
beyond reason indolent, academic, "argoi" as the Greeks 



[ 20] 

called it, even as our spiritual forefathers in Athens them- 
selves were "argoi" and academic. And that is where the 
man we are celebrating can teach us some lessons. 

There were two things remarkable in Lowell. Though 
he belonged to the academic class and was a professor in a 
university, he tried always to reach the governing class, he 
tried always to be " understanded of the people." And 
there is another thing about him, more piquant, more inter- 
esting, more curious. Though he was wit and humorist, wit 
and humorist of first-rate excellence, he did not, like other 
wits and humorists, ridicule reformers and idealists, but, 
as your Chairman has told you and as Mr. Galsworthy 
has told you, he devoted his great resources of humor and of 
wit to the cause of reform and idealism; and, if not alone, 
almost alone among wits and humorists, he fought those 
forces of conservatism which have generally, for reasons not 
very obscure, included the humorist's irony and the satirist's 
wit. 

Ladies and gentlemen, you will excuse me a reference to 
a very ancient authority. I spend my life with him and I 
can only speak out of the fullness of my heart. Plato has 
often photographed by casual anticipation the smaller and 
quainter ironies of our civilisation and Plato has an obiter 
dictum of this nature. Talking of a question which interests 
half, at least, of my audience, talking of the emancipation of 
women, of the opening to women of much greater opportunities 
of public usefulness and public service, he makes Socrates say 
to Glaucon something of this kind: "My superlative friend," 
says Socrates, "my superlative friend, let us ask these wits 
and humorists not to take today their usual line, not to 
ridicule and make fun of all this novel feminism we are 
discussing. Let us ask them not to make jokes forever about 
the ladies who wear uniforms and ride horseback" — as who 
should say, "drive motor cars and ride bicycles;" — "of 
course, they are very funny, passing funny, but so were our 
naked races very funny even to us some years ago, though 



[21 ] 

now we are familiar with them; and those naked races are 
still a scandal to all the barbarians " (and so they are still 
indeed today, ladies and gentlemen, in spite of Plato). "Let 
us ask them not to make fun of these novelties and of these 
new women, but to learn to believe and feel the truth that 
nothing is really ridiculous which is useful." 

Now, ladies and gentlemen, there you see is the doctrine, 
ancient, simple, true, that wits and humorists are generally 
people of little faith, obsessed with usage and convention, 
who, when they look abroad for targets for their ridicule of 
the incongruous, choose, in nine cases out of ten, for such 
targets only the crude faith of the reformer, the zeal without 
discretion of the idealist. The humorist does not take himself 
seriously; he has a right then not to take other men seriously; 
and how can he take seriously those most serious moods of 
the mind, which are called Faith and Idealism? If, for ex- 
ample, he took conscience very seriously, the first result would 
be — as we have all seen with our humorous friends when they 
"get religion" — an immediate falling off of wit and humor; 
these would decrease as the other increased. It happened 
conspicuously to that great humorist Lewis Carroll, when he 
grew older and more sober and more serious : he exchanged the 
life-giving nonsense of "Alice" for the painful moralizings of 
"Sylvie and Bruno." 

But if the wit and humor in a man do not decrease, ah ! 
then they increase, and at the expense of Faith; Plato recog- 
nized this, that when a wit and humorist indulges this spirit 
constantly, when he launches his shafts of ridicule only at 
the foibles of faith, only at the reformers, when his ridicule 
and wit and satire are not guarded and suppressed by his 
faith, by his feelings or his conscience, or some other force of 
that kind, then such wit and ridicule will be ever increasing, 
and he will be ever turning with greater disgust from the flaws 
and follies of reformers, and ever with a keener gusto he will 
launch his shafts at demagogism, at hysteria, at sciolism, at 
all the grotesque fancy-dress in which faith and idealism are 



[22 ] 

apt to masquerade. And after that it is but a step to a war- 
fare against all enthusiasm; that dubious quality, that de- 
batable land, a reproach to our eighteenth century ancestors, 
a condition of all virtue to the nineteenth century — en- 
thusiasm. The wit and humorist, the satirist and cynic, seem 
at last to have little definite to say except (after Talleyrand) 
"surtout point de zele" This is the temperament broadly of 
the humorist from Aristophanes down to Hookham Frere, 
his translator, down to Gibbon and Canning, down to the 
Saturday Reviewers; I think there was a touch of it in Haw- 
thorne. But it was not the way of Lowell, as two of the 
speakers have reminded you. He devotes his talents, and 
his wit and humor, and his Biglow Papers, to the defense of 
the reformers and the idealists. Well, is there anybody like 
him? 

In a gathering like this, I feel inclined to say that the very 
Princess of Humor, Miss Austen, perhaps seems at times to 
share this point of view, because she aimed all her wit and 
humor and satire at the conventionalists and conservatives; 
but perhaps she was, after all, no exception to the rule; 
because, after all, she knew nobody except conventionalists 
and conservatives; she never had a chance to meet radicals 
and idealists; and so she aimed her shafts only at the people 
she knew; and perhaps therefore was no real exception. I 
think of no other exception, unless it be Dickens, and, after 
all, he did not take types of character nor classes for his sub- 
jects. He rather sought to paint individual portraits and to 
caricature individuals. And so he hardly comes under the 
class of exceptions. 

To return again to this question of the unity of the Anglo- 
Saxon or English-speaking races. What hope have we that 
this unity will be persistent and permanent? I suppose the 
same hope which was realized by Hellenism. Reference has 
already been made by the last speaker to Hellenism. The 
Greeks were not a conquering race. With a diminishing birth 
rate, with high standards of comfort, with a very pacifist 



[ 2 3 ] 

people, what sign had they of prevailing? And yet they pre- 
vailed, because as their pacifist essayist said, "Hellenism be- 
came not a sign of race at all, it became a sign only of a cer- 
tain mind and atmosphere; it was no longer unity of race, 
it was unity of thought and of mind." And is not the same 
our hope? Do we not hope that, as Greece made Greeks of 
people who had no Greek in their blood, so our civilization is 
able to take into itself men who have nothing of Anglo-Saxon 
blood in them? Is it not so? Was not your President 
Roosevelt, for all his Dutch origin, as conspicuous a member 
of the English-speaking race as any man on the face of this 
earth? And Generals Botha and Smuts are the same. And, 
if these illustrations are rather absurd, — because, in any case, 
of course, the Dutch are our first cousins, — I will give you an- 
other. Was not the man whose body lies in state at Ottawa, 
prepared this evening for his funeral, was not Sir Wilfrid 
Laurier, English-speaking in mind, though the English word 
upon his lips was often French, more than English, in its 
accent or lack of accent? I think he was. And so with the 
great Burke, the greatest of all men sent to the British Parlia- 
ment at Westminster, the greatest of all British publicists, 
with the possible exception of Bacon, — was not the great Burke 
also ultimately English-speaking in mind as well as tongue? 
Did not that slow-moving, temperate Anglo-Saxon tempera- 
ment sober the tempests of his Celtic moodiness, and "the 
multitudinous seas" of his Irishry "incarnadine, making the 
green one red"? 

Mr. Chairman, it appears to me essential to the peace of 
the world and to the permanence of the only League of Na- 
tions of which we are already sure, of the only League of 
Nations, which is already something more than your Presi- 
dent's dream, that Anglo-Saxon unity should continue; and 
the link which holds together the chains of that Anglo- 
Saxon unity, the link itself and the substance of the chains 
which the link unites, are just the common national inheri- 
tance of humor and good humor, of justice and kindliness. 



MR. BRANDER MATTHEWS 

MEMBER OF THE ACADEMY 

It was with pleasure that I accepted the invitation to say 
a few words this evening, because it gives me occasion to pay 
a debt of gratitude. Fifty years ago, when I was an under- 
graduate at college, there fell into my hands by good fortune 
two volumes the influence of which abides with me yet. They 
were the "Essays in Criticism" of Matthew Arnold and 
"Among My Books" of James Russell Lowell. They re- 
vealed to me what criticism might be — a torch to illumine the 
pleasant path that leads to literature. 

Arnold's essays were logical in structure, enlightening 
in critical theory and stimulating in their application of the 
canons of art; and with advancing years I hold them in ever 
higher esteem. But I was more immediately attracted to 
Lowell; and I delighted in the sanity of his judgment, the 
enthusiasm of his appreciation, the individuality of his ex-^ 
pression and the coruscating brilliance of his wit. I enjoyed 
the brisk liveliness of his "Fable for Critics" and the pun- 
gency of the "Biglow Papers;" and I came in time to a richer 
understanding of his loftier lyrics and more especially his 
noble Commemoration odes, with their burning patriotism 
and their unforgetable characterization of Washington and 
Lincoln, in which we find the imagination and the elevation, 
the dignity and the certainty of a Greek inscription. 

Less than a score of years later, when Lowell had become 
our minister to Great Britain, I had the pleasure of hearing 
him speak and of having speech with him; and thereafter I 
had as high an opinion of the man as I had earlier had of the 
critic and the poet. He was a gentleman and a scholar, in the 
good old phrase; but above all else he was a man, standing on 
his own feet, doing his own thinking, and ready always to 
bear his full share of the burden of life. He was a man who 
had become a citizen of the world without ceasing to be an 

[24] 



[2 5 ] 

American of the strictest sect. He was a true cosmopolitan, 
because in Colonel Higginson's apt phrase, "he was at home 
— even in his own country/' 

He was healthy and robust, full-blooded and red-blooded, 
with no trace of dyspepsia and no taint of anemia. His 
genius was not a thing apart, "a pillared hermit of the brain" 
— to quote from his tribute to Agassiz. He boasted that he 
was a bookman; and — to borrow a figure from Dr. Holmes, 
he had "the easy feeling among books that a stable-boy has 
among horses." He could toil manfully, as a scholar must, 
for ten hours at a stretch and for weeks at a time; but he 
never allowed the dust of pedantry to stifle him. His love for 
nature, equal to his love for literature, kept him breathing the 
pure air of all outdoors. 

It is a noteworthy coincidence that two of our foremost men 
of letters have been born on days memorable in our history. 
Hawthorne, in many aspects the most peculiarly American 
of our story-tellers, was born on the Fourth of July; and Low- 
ell, with whom patriotism was a passion, was born on February 
twenty-second — a fit birthday for one who, as our representa- 
tive to Great Britain, was to do all that in him lay to empha- 
size, as we are emphasizing to-night, the essential unity of all 
the English-speaking peoples. 

In England men of letters have on occasion been called to 
the service of the state — Chaucer and Milton and Addison. 
Here in the United States we have followed the example 
of the Italian Republics, who sent Dante and Petrarch and 
Ariosto on missions of importance. Franklin was our first 
envoy to France; and later Irving was sent to Spain, Bancroft 
to Germany, and Motley to Austria. More recently three 
members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters have 
represented us in foreign parts — Thomas Nelson Page in 
Italy, Henry van Dyke in Holland and Brand Whitlock in 
Belgium. Thackeray called Irving "the first ambassador 
that the New World of letters sent to the Old;" and Irving 
humorously accounted for the cordiality of his reception in 



[ 26] 

England as due in part to the surprise of the British at seeing 
an American with a quill in his hand and not in his hair. 

From Franklin's day to the present, the men of letters 
whom we have sent abroad have held it to be their foremost 
duty to make friends for their country in the land to which 
they were accredited, to remove all sources of misunder- 
standing, to do all in their power to further peace and good 
will. This was LowelPs aim, when he was transferred from 
Madrid to London. There was a pleasant piquancy in our 
sending to the British, the bard who rimed the stinging stanzas 
of " Jonathan to John;" but the choice was wise, if only be- 
cause the British have ever a higher regard for a man who has 
stood up to them squarely. Lowell's Americanism was un- 
compromising, yet he never felt himself an alien in the little 
"isle set in the silver sea." Perhaps it was because he held 
himself to be a direct descendant of the Elizabethans that he 
was able to make himself so easily at home among the Vic- 
torians. He had good humor as well as humor; and his 
smile irradiated friendliness. 

All the years Lowell was in England he kept the flag flying 
at the masthead, altho he frequently dipped his colors in the 
courtesy of a salute. The late Colonel Eustace Balfour, a 
son-in-law of the Duke of Argyle, told me that the family 
were always glad when Lowell visited Inverary, but that they 
had then to keep a guard on their tongues, lest an innocent 
allusion to America might abraid Lowell's susceptibility. 
He took the same stalwart attitude in all his many speeches, 
in his charming talks at the dinner-table as well as in his more 
deeply meditated addresses. At Birmingham he declared 
the virtues of Democracy, leaving the discussion of its vices 
until he returned home and told us the duty of the Independent 
in Politics. 

At a dinner given thirty years ago by the Incorporated 
Society of Authors, of which Tennyson was President, to 
Lowell and to the other American men of letters who chanced 
to be in London that summer, in recognition of our efforts in 



[2 7 ] 

behalf of international copyright, he made one of the happiest 
of his speeches, as full of good will as it was of "good things." 
I recall the smile with which he said that he had been told 
often enough that we Americans were inclined to see only our 
side of any question and that we were apt to think we were 
always in the right. Then he added: "This certainly con- 
duces to peace of mind and imperturbability of judgment, 
whatever other merits it may have. I am sure I do not know 
where we got it. Do you?" 

And at an earlier speech at Emmanuel College, the alma 
mater of John Harvard, he spoke of the community of blood 
between America and England, the community of institu- 
tions, and the community of language — "or shall I say the 
partial community of language. At any rate I must allow 
that, considering how long we have been divided from you, 
you speak English remarkably well." Possibly one or another 
of his hearers might have taken this as an instance of a cer- 
tain condescension in a foreigner, were it not that the British 
never looked upon Lowell as a foreigner. Nor did he so re- 
gard himself, for he knew that we are all the children of Chau- 
cer, the subjects of King Shakspere, the co-heirs of Milton 
and Dryden. We might be separated by a thousand leagues 
of "the salt, unplumbed, estranging sea," we might be kept 
apart politically by allegiance to a different fatherland, but 
we were forever united in our possession of a common mother- 
tongue. 

It is recorded that in the darkest days of the Revolutionary 
War, a perfervid patriot in the Continental Congress, moved 
that we renounce the use of the English language and adopt 
one of our own — whereupon Roger Sherman moved to amend 
that we retain the English language and compel the British to 
learn some other. If either of these impossible motions had 
been carried, and if either of them could have been put into 
effect, no one would have been more aggrieved than Lowell. 
He knew our noble tongue in its remoter historical recesses; 
and he was always glad when he could adduce evidence that 



[28] 

the thread out of which our homely Yankee speech is woven 
had been spun in Elizabethan England. He knew that our 
language was not a loan to us but an inheritance, and that ours 
was no younger brother's portion but, as the lawyers say, a 
whole and undivided half. Wherefore we must ever share 
the responsibility for keeping English fit for service, Dure and 
vigorous and supple. 

It was at a dinner given to the late Sir Henry Irving be- 
fore the first of his many professional visits to the United 
States, that I heard Lowell assert that an after-dinner speech 
ought to contain an anecdote, a platitude and a quotation. 
I have ventured upon more than one anecdote; and I dare 
not hope that I have escaped uttering more than one platitude. 
But I have saved the quotation to the end. I take it from 
the verses which Emerson wrote just sixty years ago to be 
read at the dinner given to Lowell on his fortieth birthday: — 

Man of marrow, man of mark, 
Virtue lodged in sinew stark; 
Rich supplies and never stinted, 
More behind at need is hinted. 



Too well gifted to have found 
Yet his opulence's bound. 

Logic, passion, cordial zeal, 
Such as bard and hero feel, 
— Strength for the hour — 
For the day sufficient power. 



But if another temper come, 

If on the sun shall creep a gloom, 

Then the pleasant bard will know 
To put his frolic mask behind him, 
Like an old summer cloak, 
And in sky-born mail to bind him, 
And singlehanded cope with Time, 
And parry — and deal the thunder-stroke. 



REPRESENTATION OF "DEAR BRUTUS" 
February 2ist 

On the evening of February 21st the Academy invited 
its foreign guests and others to a performance of "Dear 
Brutus" at the Empire Theatre, New York. The occasion 
was planned in honor of Mr. William Gillette, member of the 
American Academy, whose company was producing the play, 
and of its author, Sir James M. Barrie, member of the British 
Academy, who unfortunately found himself unable to accept 
the invitation to be present as a guest on this occasion. 

After the presentation of the play, Mr. Robert Underwood 
Johnson read the letter which follows, saying by way of pref- 
ace: 

"This letter from Sir James Barrie, which I have been asked to read, 
has additional significance from the fact that it is written from the Athe- 
naeum Club, the intellectual Gibraltar of England. This club, founded by 
Sir Walter Scott and some of his contemporaries, holds upon the list of its 
members virtually every distinguished English statesman, divine, author, 
artist, and composer — in fact, every great Englishman of the last hundred 
years. Mr. Lowell was a member ex-ofFicio, and a welcome guest; and the 
only other Americans on its list of regular members have been three members 
of the Academy, Mr. Henry James, Mr. Edwin A. Abbey and another, now 
the only American member, happily present here to-night, Mr. Brander 
Matthews. Mr. Kipling once wrote me that there was only one other 
honor to be ranked above membership in the Athenaeum — to be made a 
peer of the realm ! It is no wonder, therefore, that Mr. Barrie, writing in 
the atmosphere of England's greatness, should reveal, through all the play- 
fulness of his style, his appreciation of the seriousness of this momentous 
hour, when his country and ours, in common with the rest of the civilized 
world, are struggling for an honorable unity on the lines of justice and 
permanent peace." 

[29] 



[ 30] 

Writing to the Chairman of the Committee of Arrange- 
ments for the Lowell Commemoration, Mr. Barrie says: 

The Athenaeum, S. W. 

January 23, 19 19. 
Dear Mr. Murray Butler: 

If I were there on the 20th, to appear in public for the first and only 
time, I should be well content if the first and only speech of my life was on 
the passionate desire of my heart — a closer friendship between America 
and Britain. 

I should probably make my speech from Lob's favorite position — 
beneath the table. Even then the front row only would hear me (and the 
others would be the lucky ones). I would have to say that I could not 
make a speech to a thousand people, but that if they would join me — one 
at a time, beneath the table, I would make a thousand speeches to them. 
I would tell them that the play of "Dear Brutus" is an allegory about a 
gentleman called John Bull who years and years ago missed the oppor- 
tunity of his life (like Bacon when he did not write Shakespeare). The 
Mr. Dearth of the play is really John Bull — as Mr. Gillette cunningly in- 
dicates by his figure. Margaret, the Might Have Been, is really America. 
The play shows how on the fields of France this father and daughter get 
a second opportunity of coming together; and the nightingale is George 
Washington asking them to do it on his birthday. Are the two now to 
make it up permanently, or for ever to drift apart? Second chances come 
to few, and as for a third chance, whoever heard of it? It is now or never. 
If it is now, something will have been accomplished greater than the war 
itself: democracy will have sown its noblest seed, the fruit whereof America 
was created to give forth, that every child born into the world should 
have an equal chance. The future of mankind is listening for our decision : 
if we cannot rise to the second chance, ours will be the blame, but the 
sorrow will be posterity's. We shall have to say sadly enough: 
"The fault, dear Jonathan, is not in our stars 
But in ourselves, that we are underlings." 

J. M. Barrie. 

Mr. Gillette, responding to a curtain call, spoke as follows : 

The inadequacy of anything that could possibly be said to an audience 
of this character and under circumstances of this description *s so hideous 
that it borders on the alluring. 

When I received orders to come out and say a few words (I am not 
doing it of my own free will — thank God !) or perhaps I had better say, when 
the constituted authorities suggested that it would be wise for me to do 
this, I very well knew that something extraordinary — of one kind or 



[3i J 

another — must, if possible, be accomplished. My first idea was to address 
you in Latin rather than make use of so commonplace a medium as the 
English language; but when I asked Mr. Augustus Thomas what he 
thought of this, he said: "No, don't do that — some of them might under- 
stand what you said I" This appeared to be good advice, and so, contrary 
to my custom with Mr. Thomas, I took it. In the same way one brilliant 
idea after another was discarded, until finally I found myself with nothing 
left to do or to talk about but the painfully obvious. 

But even though it is obvious I welcome the opportunity of placing it 
on record in so many words that every one of us who is concerned in the 
presentation of Mr. Barrie's delightful comedy feels and appreciates the 
reflected compliment of the Academy's choice for this evening. For, al- 
though that choice was certainly based on the play itself, it quite neces- 
sarily drags us in along with it, thus giving us the chance to profit thereby 
as best we can. 

Indeed, we are in a position to go still further and feel the reflected 
honor and satisfaction of being thus made to play a part — a very small 
part, it is true, but in this case a very small part is a very great one — in the 
centenary celebration of the birth of James Russell Lowell. 

At this stage of the world's progress (as it is called), when it is becoming 
more and more evident to those who can see that humanity is rapidly ap- 
proaching the condition where it will have very little of value left to it but 
its memories, to be associated — even to this very modest degree — with the 
celebration of one of the most delightful of these memories is a privilege 
indeed. 



LITERARY EXERCISES AT THE RITZ-CARLTON 

HOTEL 

WILLIAM M. SLOANE 

CHANCELLOR OF THE ACADEMY 

The Centenary of Mr. Lowell's birth was further cele- 
brated on the morning of the 2id of February by literary 
exercises under the chairmanship of Professor William Milligan 
Sloane, Chancellor of the Academy, who said: 

Ladies and gentlemen, guests of the Academy, and in 
particular kinsmen from beyond the border, whether it be 
beyond the seas or to our North, you are very welcome here. 
The venerated President of the Academy, Mr. William Dean 
Howells, will never be venerable, for, according to the Greek 
proverb, "Whom the Gods love stay young until they die." 
He has sent a letter in which he expresses the most profound 
regret that he cannot leave the South, where he is at present, 
far away, and show his appreciation on this occasion. He 
adds that on almost every page written by him he has felt 
his indebtedness to Mr. Lowell, and that, out of the fulness 
of his heart, he has written again and again, so that, in case 
he could have been here, with all his modesty he says it, he 
would have had nothing to say which he has not already 
said. 

The collective person or personage which we call a nation 
is supposed for the most part to be destitute of emotion, and 
indeed the business of the state and the nation is the material 
prosperity, in the first place, of those who compose it; but, for 
all that, it does have emotions. These emotions appear best 

[33] 



[ 34 ] 

in times of strain and stress. The union of hearts shows itself 
in the hour of danger. Now, the common adventure of the 
English-speaking people has brought us to one of those mo- 
ments where feeling comes to the surface. In the surge and 
skimming has been revealed to himself the rare gold of the 
Anglo-Saxon. We have always been one in tradition, we have 
been one in common institutions, above all else we have been 
one in our glorious common speech, but for the first time we 
have been one, absolutely one, in action. Not but that we 
Americans can recall many instances where in our early history 
we owed the perpetuation of our liberties to the intervention of 
the mother country, not but that often in recent times there 
have been exhibitions of the most charming friendship, but 
the moment in which we are living marks the sublime con- 
summation of our heart's desire. 

In every instant of our history there have been prophets 
and seers who knew what was in the womb of time and what 
were the things to come, but they met with profound dis- 
couragements. We revere the memories of such men. Their 
task was hard, but their vision was never dimmed, and their 
courage was never daunted. They were pioneers; they hewed 
the path straight onward, but they knew enough to look back- 
ward for direction and guidance and inspiration from the 
people who for centuries had used the English language. 

Now, ladies and gentlemen, of all historical sources, the 
least tainted by pretense and the freest from insincerity are 
literature and art, the fine arts. In our Academy and In- 
stitute artists and writers have discovered in that fact the 
bond of their union, a bond of the strongest kind. The 
writers, of course, are not concerned alone with content, they 
are likewise concerned with form, and it is their business, one 
of the affairs of our Academy, one of its chiefest concerns, 
to preserve and cherish our English speech as an heritage 
beyond price, a tongue which is to be kept, not only vigorous 
in its history and in its forms of expression, but pure in what 
it expresses. To men like-minded with ourselves we look for 



[35] 

help and encouragement, wherever such men are throughout 
the earth. Because we have noted the gallantry of your 
writers and painters, your wielders of brush and pen, during 
the four years of battle for all that makes our lives worth 
while, battle for what we cherish above all things, because of 
that, we wanted to see you, to see these friends of ours face 
to face, to look them in the eye. They do us good. They 
have done us good; because, long before we entered the 
fight of the allies, we scanned the picture and the page from 
all British dominions to grasp the true elemental causes of 
this warfare, and, as we discerned them, perhaps none too 
quickly, and felt that the same insult was being put upon us 
as had been put upon them, and that this was no sordid 
quarrel for petty trade rights, but that it was an enormous 
struggle for the preservation of a type of civilization unknown 
along the banks of the Rhine and eastward, our souls were 
moved within us and we could no longer stand idle. The 
sun of our civilization may have been obscured by the dim 
clouds of warfare and strife, but it has not been, in even the 
slightest degree, eclipsed, and we want our friends to join with 
us in emphasizing to themselves, as we do to ourselves, the 
fact that this epoch is indeed the most memorable in all 
modern history because it brings together these united forces 
in action and in temper for the preservation of that civiliza- 
tion which, in the long run, however dark the way may appear 
to some of us, is going to illuminate the world. 

This anniversary — I want to say this particularly to Mr. 
Noyes, who has claimed him for the mother country — this 
anniversary marks the birth of that colonial American, who, 
in the opinion of the wisest men of his day and since, really 
saved the liberties of the British nation against the onslaughts 
of a German king. We do not begrudge you such share as you 
had in him, but, after all, George Washington and what he 
stood for saved the liberties of the Anglo-Saxon race. 

This is also the anniversary of the birth of an American 
statesman, a man of letters, who did the best that in him lay 



[36] 

to promote amity and concord between the America of Abra- 
ham Lincoln and the Britain of Queen Victoria. Mr. Lowell 
was a man of far sight. Others will refer, as reference has 
already been made, to many of his most extraordinary quali- 
ties, but at the outset I want to call your attention to one fact. 
There is at Stratford a memorial fountain, the gift of an 
American. In dedicating that fountain, Mr. Lowell brought 
to the fore something that I wish to commend to this audience, 
and to our friends outside of it. He brought to the fore that 
which is elusive and which we do not always grasp. I have 
been extremely interested in the later French literature to 
see what emphasis is put upon the same thing. The world 
for the most part, when it is cursed, is cursed by the misrule 
of pure reason and hard logic; we and ours have been tor- 
tured by the arrogant self-assertion of a rationalistic culture. 
When the world is blessed, it is for the most part blessed by 
qualities quite different. Since Mr. Lowell's death, what have 
we seen ? That hard, cold, realistic, logical philosophy driven 
home to its very bitter conclusion, and then brought forward 
by force upon an unwilling world. 

What makes this world fit to live in — historians know it 
now as they never knew it before — are the bonds of instinct, 
of sentiment and of charm. They have been the controlling 
forces. If there is to be peace on earth, these are the things 
that will lead to it and establish it on a firm foundation. I 
borrow an idea already better expressed by Lowell than I 
could hope to do. And in borrowing I trust we may all 
assimilate it. In order to control insight and sympathy and 
charm, we must keep our collective lives, historical and 
spiritual, up to the level of what our joint policy has always 
been, and lift our ideals much higher if we can. We must 
make it the joy of the English-speaking company of nations 
to reach those things which appeal to the very depths of their 
beings. 

That is one of our ideals in the Academy. We feel that 
no greater contribution could be made to the earthly millen- 



[37 ] 

nium, for which we are waiting long, and we welcome you all 
as fellow workers in such a cause. 

I have the honor and the pleasure to introduce a speaker 
whose name is known wherever men cherish such contribu- 
tions to literature as Americans have been able to make. In 
his charming book of Sorbonne lectures he has been for long 
years the intermediator between the French people and the 
Anglo-Saxon people, to such an extent as none other known 
to me— Mr. Barrett Wendell. 



MR. BARRETT WENDELL 

MEMBER OF THE ACADEMY 

When Robert Browning died, Mr. Lowell, then seventy 
years old, was asked whether he would send a few memorial 
words about him to a literary magazine conducted by Har- 
vard students. His answer was characteristic — at once 
quizzical and serious: nothing would have pleased him more 
if he had had the strength and the courage for the evidently 
needful task of reading the works of Browning through again, 
to begin with. The students who received this word were 
a little perplexed; but remembering Mr. Lowell as a college 
teacher, I could almost see the urbanely teasing look and hear 
the suavely equivocal voice with which he might have spoken 
it. His gravest moods, and they were frequent, would not 
have been quite his if there had not bubbled near the surface 
of them some sparkle of effervescent fun; his most volatile 
outbreaks of wit or humor or nonsense often wafted you to the 
edge of the shadows. The Chiron-like abundance of his inter- 
mingled moustache and beard, which at first looked like an 
innocently fantastic affectation, took another aspect when you 
reflected that nothing could more effectually have protected 
lips perhaps irrepressible in their tendency to twitch or to 
quiver. There was never more conscientious critic than he; 
yet while studiously judging a new edition of Shakespere, he 
was capable of such an obiter dictum as this: "To every com- 
mentator who has wantonly tampered with the text, or ob- 
scured it with his inky cloud of paraphrase, we feel inclined 
to apply the quadrisyllabic name of the brother of Agis, king of 
Sparta." It was President Felton, they say, who first dis- 
covered this obscure name to reveal itself as Eudamidas. 

Whatever else, those who have known even slightly such 
a man, as he lived and moved in the New England which bred 
him, can hardly realize that he is not actually alive; and that 

[38] 



I 39 J 

in a few years more he must become a thing no longer of mem- 
ory but only of record. He would have completed his century, 
though, this Washington's birthday. Not only he but the 
world he knew — Victorian they call it nowadays — is a matter 
of the irrevocable past; and we thinning few whose pious 
gratitude still keeps the blood to give their filmy and vaporous 
shades some little semblance of renewed solidity must do our 
Odyssean task soon. That is why I have tremulously felt 
imperative an unexpected call to say what I can in memory 
of one whose presence can never quite fade so long as any who 
knew it cast their shadows in the sunshine. 

For them, or I may better say for us, his copious publica- 
tions can never seem quite complete. His collected works 
make an impressive series of volumes, prose and verse, poems 
and essays. Every line in them is sincerely his own. His 
style, however, even though we freely grant that throughout 
letters the style is the man, is not quite the whole of him, nor 
indeed perhaps altogether the best. As you turn his pages, 
you can hardly avoid the impression that here is one who, 
whenever he took up his pen, could not help feeling literate. 
In this there is no tinge of affectation. All his life, he truly 
loved literature. His passion, however, was not quite ele- 
mentary. He was almost always aware of it, somewhat as a 
courtly lover of troubadour times was always aware of the 
perfections of his mistress. To forget them, even for a little 
while, would have been to lapse from the happy duty of affec- 
tionate reverence, not quite to keep purely ideal a sentiment 
which any touch of crude reality might begin to vulgarize. 
Loyalty itself forbade that he should ever treat his love un- 
gently; and Lowell was loyalty itself. There was a touch of 
confession, accordingly, or at least of unwitting self-revela- 
tion, in something which he used now and then to tell his pu- 
pils — I am not sure whether he ever wrote it down: " Ameri- 
cans, " he would say, "have no vernacular/' 

When we stop to think, we can hardly fail to see what he 
meant. Language is the material in which men embody 



[40] 

thought and feeling, or the instrument, if you prefer, which 
makes every one of us, each in his little way, fleetingly a 
creator. There are men and peoples so fortunate as habitu- 
ally to work with this material, or to use this instrument, easily 
and instinctively; give them thoughts and words, and they 
will presently give them fits. Less lucky folks must frequently 
be plagued by wondering whether their words fit their thoughts 
quite so well as they might, or as they ought to. The moment 
this question arises, no matter how deft a craftsman you may 
be, you cannot help knowing what you are about. Once 
aware of this, you may give your work many and various 
merits; it cannot quite preserve, however, the charm of un- 
thinking ease. Those who possess a vernacular know what 
they are saying, those who lack one know how they are saying 
it — and such knowledge leaves indefinable but unmistakable 
traces. You will find them throughout the English of Ameri- 
cans — even in their talk, or in their correspondence, and still 
more in the careful revision of their literature. We may say 
things and write things almost excellently; we hardly ever 
do so quite unconsciously. And as one turns the pages of 
LowelPs Works one inclines to think that he never did, from 
beginning to end. 

At the same time, there can be no sort of doubt that he was 
a consummate master of language. You can feel this in al- 
most every line that he published; you can feel it in his familiar 
letters, however grave or gay, or paradoxical; you felt it in his 
talk as a teacher; and some of those who knew him best have 
said that you could feel it most in his intimate talk as a man — 
particularly when almost anybody else might have found 
language to fail in the matter of expletive. Like the master 
he was, too, he enjoyed playing with the refractory thing which 
he had mastered; he could translate into current slang, and 
seemingly off-hand, some string of epithets from Rabelais; 
he could bring you to pause, the next moment, by some shrewd 
bit of wisdom such as has made almost four centuries of readers 
wonder what Rabelais meant; he could be grave to the point 



[41 ] 

of solemnity, and tender to the verge — if not sometimes over 
the verge — of sentimentality. He could play with words 
incomparably; at a Phi Beta Kappa dinner, where he hap- 
pened to touch on Virgil, he is said to have declared that he 
had never opened the Bucolics without feeling "Tityre tu." 
And in the academic oration which he delivered on the 250th 
anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, he made the 
most unexpected of quotations : "The founders of the College/' 
he said, "believed with the old poet that whipping was a 'wild 
benefit of nature/ and could they have read Wordsworth's 
exquisite stanza: 

'One impulse from a vernal wood 

Can teach us more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 

Than all the sages can/ 

they would have struck out 'vernal' and inserted 'birchen' 
in the margin." The wonder of this, perhaps, can never be 
fully felt except by those who heard him read the lines; he 
somehow managed, with no evident trick, to get the full swish 
of a pedagogic rod into the word "impulse." 

To imagine, however, that this joyous jugglery was a bit 
final with him would be not to understand him. His definition 
of a university, in that same oration, sounds paradoxical: 
"A university is a place where nothing useful is taught; but 
a university is possible only where a man may get his liveli- 
hood by digging Sanskrit roots." Really, however, he was 
deeply and beautifully serious. His gloss on this text is too 
long to read now; but here is a memorable passage from it: 
"Let the Humanities be maintained undiminished in their 
ancient right. Leave in their traditional pre-eminence those 
arts that were rightly called liberal; those studies that kindle 
the imagination, and through it irradiate the reason; those 
studies that manumitted the modern mind; those in which 
the brains of finest temper have found alike their stimulus and 
their repose, taught by them that the power of intellect is 



[42 ] 

heightened in proportion as it is made gracious by measure 
and symmetry." His use of the word "measure," in just this 
place, harks back to Dante; "misura," — literally to be 
translated as "measure/' or as "order," — was in troubadour 
times the technical term for a virtue which Dante held essen- 
tial in life as well as in letters; and I remember how Mr. 
Lowell dwelt in his class-room on the lines where Dante tells 
the shade of Jacopo Rusticucci what has befallen the city 
from which both were exiled — one for life, the other for 
eternity : 

"La gente nuova e i subiti guadagni 
Orgoglio e dismisura han generata, 
Fiorenza, in te." 

"The self-made people with their ready wealth 
Pride and disdain of order have begot, 
Florence, in thee." 

We happened to be reading that passage toward the end of 
President Grant's administration. Lowell at least implied 
that it was ominously applicable to the country which he 
loved with all his heart. "Dismisura" — lack of measure, 
disdain of order, neglect of true values — is among the vilest 
of evils and the most insidious. There is no need to remind 
ourselves that Lowell was all his life an ardent reformer; our 
danger is rather that we may forget that he was as eager to 
preserve what is good as to destroy what is evil. Nothing 
could have been much more remote from his literal political 
principles than the conception of the Holy Roman Empire, 
so passionately set forth by Dante; yet Dante himself, whom 
Lowell cherished beyond all other poets, could not have be- 
lieved more fervently than he that final righteousness must 
give everything its due — that the essence of damnation may 
be found in the words: 

"Che senza speme vivemmo in disio;" 
"Hopeless we live in longing;" 



[43] 

that the essence of purgation may be found in penitent suffer- 
ings, 

"Dove poter peccar non e piu nostro;" 

"Wherein the power to sin is ours no more;" 

and that the essence of salvation lies in eternally miraculous 
submission to those marvellous words of the Lord's Prayer, 
"Thy will be done." The will of God, like the peace of God, 
passeth all understanding; at least, however, we can discern 
that, even as revealed by the course of earthly things, — Nature, 
Fate, whatever you choose, — it inexorably denies that better is 
the same as worse, evil as good, chaos as order; and those who 
unflinchingly seek its earthly semblance, may come even in 
life to know that 

"In la Sua voluntade e nostra pace;" 
"In His will is our peace." 

If I have seemed for a little while to stray, it is only be- 
cause those three lines of the Divine Comedy have stayed with 
me since I first began to feel their meaning in Mr. Lowell's 
class-room, more than forty years ago. " Dante," he once 
said, "will never lead you wrong." From Dante and from 
Lowell's teaching alike one learned to believe that even though 
duty bid us condemn and extirpate whatever is ignoble, it 
equally bids us sustain and improve whatever is good. The 
spirit of true reform, no matter what shape it takes, is not 
destructive; the task of true reformers is rather an inces- 
santly nobler reshaping of that which, still and forever imper- 
fect, is happily already ours. 

Among the things most surely ours must always and 
everywhere be our heritage. That of the Lowells happens 
to be peculiarly American. Before 1640, Percival Lowell, an 
elderly man of some comparative fortune and condition, 
came from Somersetshire to Newbury, in Massachusetts, 
where he survived to advanced age. With him came a son, 



[ 44 ] 

about forty years old, and a grandson of ten. The son died 
at the age of fifty-two. The grandson lived to marry three 
times and to beget nineteen children, dying in apparently re- 
duced circumstances. His fifteenth son, born in Boston in 
1675, lived only until 171 1; and the fact that he is not men- 
tioned in Sewall's Diary implies that he was inconspicuous. 
If so, it amounts to a personal distinction; for it has not been 
the case with any of his descendants since the reign of Queen 
Anne. In 1721 his son, John Lowell, then eighteen years old, 
took his degree at Harvard College, and five years later he 
was ordained pastor of the First Church of Newburyport, 
where he passed the rest of his life. His son John, who took 
his degree in 1760, became a lawyer, was active in politics, 
removed to Boston, was appointed Judge of the United States 
District Court in Massachusetts by Washington, and if John 
Adams's "midnight judges" had held their offices would have 
died Chief Justice of the Circuit Court. He married three 
times; by each marriage he had one son; a great-grandson of 
the eldest is the present president of Harvard College; the 
second is remembered as the founder of the factory system in 
what has long been the city of Lowell, Massachusetts; the 
third, Charles, who took his degree in 1800, became pastor 
of the West Church in Boston. James Russell Lowell was 
the youngest of this reverend gentleman's six children. By 
his time, the condition of the family was such that when, in 
1877, a Bostonian who happened to be in London was asked 
whether he knew Mr. Lowell, he artlessly answered "Which?" 
There were at least five other descendants of the first Judge 
Lowell — one of them himself on the United States bench — 
who, from a local point of view, might equally well have been 
so denominated. And there have been at least as many more 
since — including a third Federal Judge. 

Such facts as these we conventionally hold trivial. Duly 
considered, however, they are important. It needs little re- 
flection to perceive that nothing could more clearly define 
what Lowell was. In the first place, this family record proves 



[ 45 ] 

him to have come from a stock which for two centuries has 
displayed exceptional power of working hard and well without 
the stimulus of social adversity — itself, when one stops to 
think, an implicit evidence of weakness. In the second place, 
though he would now have been a hundred years old, he was 
already in the eighth American generation. The first two 
were English-born, and born under Queen Elizabeth; but 
they deliberately chose to cast their lot in America, and to die 
here. The third, though English-born — like Samuel Sewall 
himself, the most typical of Yankee diarists — had only Ameri- 
can experience. The next four, three of them graduates of 
Harvard College, knew life only as life presents itself to those 
who have completely lost all personal traditions foreign to our 
own country. For better or worse, they were wholly Ameri- 
can, and nothing else; their relation with the old world was 
only a matter of history — like that of Englishmen to the regions 
inhabited by Anglo-Saxon or Norman ancestors a thousand or 
fifteen hundred years ago. Such native quality is really a 
matter of human memory; nobody can ever be quite native 
anywhere, so long as anybody remembers where else he came 
from; when a stock knows its alien origin only by tradition, 
and only then — no matter how staunch its loyalty, — it be- 
comes incontestably native. One traditional phase of Yan- 
kee nativity, a certain pretense to disdain of other than Yan- 
kee conditions, lurked in an offhand pleasantry of Lowell's 
before one of his classes. He happened to touch on the Ger- 
man legend of the Swan Maidens, and, unconsciously prophet- 
ic, told how some Teutonic gentlemen, riding near a pond, 
observed pretty girls bathing there, "and with the knightly 
courtesy of the olden time, stole their clothes." 

In Lowell, however, there was dormant another than this 
completely native strain. His mother's father, who lived 
in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was born in Orkney; and 
so was her maternal grandfather, who held office under the last 
royal governor of New Hampshire, and left America with 
other loyalists at the time of the Revolution. The wife of 



[46] 

this gentleman, however, passed her last days at Portsmouth; 
her father was among the signers of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. She nevertheless stayed as loyal to the olden time 
as her husband was; and Lowell liked to tell how all her 
life she kept the Fourth of July, with closed blinds, as a day of 
mourning. Loyalties, even though extinct, are reverend; 
or what would become of Walter Scott? Through the Cutts 
family, besides, this lady traced some manner of kinship with 
that childless early New Hampshire worthy, Francis Champer- 
nowne, of Dartington, — himself a kinsman of Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh. Lowell, I think, never al- 
luded to this ; but if he ever knew it he can hardly have for- 
gotten it. Here was a link of his own with giant forefathers 
of our Western world. 

The Cambridge house where he was born, too, where he 
mostly lived and where he died was — and remains — an ideal 
nursery of tradition. Built by an eminent officer of the 
Crown, confiscated by the Revolution, for some years the 
home of Elbridge Gerry, who died Madison's Vice-President 
of the United States well before Lowell's father bought it, 
nothing can be more admirably New English. Its simplicity, 
and the delicacy of its proportions and of its detail, mark it 
as what we now call "Colonial" American. Except for 
Georgian England, nevertheless, it could no more have existed 
than the pediments and colonnades of Renaissance architecture 
could have come into being except for the temples of Greece. 
You can hardly see it, and you surely cannot enter it, without 
a haunting sense both of how our independent nation originated 
and of the days when America and the Mother Country were 
still at one. This atmosphere, which surrounded him all his 
life, he not only imbibed but enriched. The books of his 
overflowing library seemed to belong there as nowhere else. 
Though nothing less than all literature was his province, the 
region of literature most instantly his own was English; and 
the literature he made has its due place in that of which the 
four great Masters are Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespere 



[47] 

and Milton — common possessions of all English-speaking 
mankind. Loyalty to ourselves even now demands, and must 
forever demand, loyalty to them. His never wavered. He 
was never more himself than when a student found him one 
evening, before his wood-fire, his book-shelves in dim back- 
ground, with a big folio on his knee from which he presently 
kept on reading aloud. It chanced to be open at some pas- 
sage from the Apocrypha, not itself supremely memorable. 
As Lowell read the words, though, they seemed supremely to 
assert the supreme beauty of surge and cadence unconsciously 
achieved by that marvellous generation of nameless masters 
who gave us the English Bible. Some echo of this appears 
always to have haunted him. When he wrote of Dry den "I 
have long thought that he was the last great writer of . . . 
English prose," he gave less than the fundamental reason for 
his opinion. He was right in saying that before 1700 "the lan- 
guage had not yet been sophisticated by writing for the press " 
and that Dry den "wrote as a gentleman rather than as an 
author." A deeper secret still, however, of the charm he 
felt lies in the fact that even though Dryden was almost the 
first to show what Gallicized niceties could do with English 
prose, he was also among the last to preserve instinctive sense 
of that grandeur which pervades the prose rhythm of English 
from the time when it came into existence until the beginning 
of the Eighteenth Century. The splendor of this rhythm 
Lowell could never quite forget. You can hardly feel the 
full quality of his own style until you understand that it 
bears to Dryden's, and to that of Englishmen who wrote 
earlier, some such relation as is borne by Virgilian graces to 
"the surge and thunder of the Odyssey." 

Now and again, inconspicuous passages reveal more of a 
poet's meaning than you may find in those which appear more 
memorable and more beautiful. Four lines from Lowell's 
Ode read at Concord on the 19th of April, 1875, tne Centenary 
of the first shedding of blood in the American Revolution, 
excellently summarize how, at the age of fifty-six, the tradi- 



[48] 

tions of his heritage had made him regard that fatal disunion 
of British Empire: 

"Here English law and English thought 
'Gainst the self-will of England fought; 
And here were men (coequal with their fate) 
Who did great things, unconscious they were great." 

These words, if I am not all astray, set forth true American 
loyalty; yet this loyalty would not be itself were it not New 
English too, and as New English, sprung from the thought 
and the law and the literature ancestral alike to Old England 
and to New. 

By that time he seemed a robust elderly man of letters 
who had virtually done his work but might live on for many 
quiet years with his college classes and in his library, now and 
then writing poems and essays more sure of admiration than 
of perusal. Though except for occasional epigrams in the 
Biglow Papers he had never been widely popular, his faithful- 
ness to his literary vocation had brought its reward. So far 
as anything in New England can be regarded as classic, both 
his poems and his essays had won this dignity. He had never 
showed much narrative power — the quality which most in- 
stantly attracts readers; but his criticism had been cordially 
recognized abroad, refreshing and reviving English interest 
in the boundless treasures of English literature. Oxford had 
conferred on him her D.C.L., and Cambridge her LL.D. One 
carelessly thought of him as to some extent an international 
personage, forgetting if ever aware that until he was well past 
thirty years old he had hardly strayed further from our Massa- 
chusetts Cambridge than the Maine Woods or the City ol 
Washington. His concern with public affairs had been only as 
a fearlessly sincere critic. From his Anti-Slavery days and his 
Yankee dialect rhymes which remain the most nearly endur- 
ing of American political satires to his occasionally perfervid 
political essays in the Atlantic Monthly and the North Amer- 
ican Review and to the solemn dignity of his Commemoration 



[ 49 J 

Ode, he had never hesitated to tell what he believed the truth 
about the course and the tendencies of our United States of 
America. He had never been called on, though, to bear 
much if any public responsibility, and his social relations, 
both at home and in Europe, extended little beyond the com- 
pany of his fellow-craftsmen in the art of letters. Those who 
knew him could not help liking him, partly for his irrepressible 
fun, always animating moods which otherwise might have got 
over-serious or over-sentimental. On the whole, however, it 
sometimes seemed rather a wonder that both Cambridge, the 
mother of Harvard, and Oxford, the mother of Cambridge, had 
been roused to recognize his achievement by robing him in 
academic scarlet. This kindly tribute of England to the merit 
of New England appeared worthily to complete an honest and 
honorable literary career. 

The next year, his public career began. At the age of fifty- 
seven he was sent as a delegate to the convention which nomi- 
nated a Republican candidate for the presidency. Though the 
candidate chosen was other than he would have preferred, he 
loyally accepted the decision of the convention, and when, 
after the closest and perhaps the most perilous political con- 
test in American history, President Hayes was inaugurated, 
Lowell was before long appointed Minister to Spain. There 
he remained for between two and three years, constantly 
confronted with duties both professional and personal, both 
responsible and social, for which his fitness had never before 
been tested, and constantly proving himself to possess not 
only adequate but exceptional practical ability. For two 
hundred years the Lowells have had a way of doing wherever 
they have happened to be; and he was not a Lowell for 
nothing. By themselves those years in Spain would have as- 
sured him a new kind of eminence, perhaps modest but un- 
questionably distinct. They were not suffered to stay by 
themselves. Just about thirty-nine years ago — that is, just 
about his sixty-first birthday — he was transferred from the 
comparatively secondary Spanish mission to the office which 



[50] 

the circumstances of our history have made and kept the most 
important in our diplomatic service, the mission to England. 
In England, for the next five years, his position was far more 
conspicuous than it had ever been anywhere before, or than 
it ever was at home. 

There, in full light, such as gleams through that window, 
above the dim entrance to the Chapter House of Westminster 
Abbey, which consecrates his memory at the most holy shrine 
of English and English-speaking tradition, England and 
America could at last see him as he was. Part of what made 
him so was that, for all the self-consciousness inseparable 
from Yankee heritage, he was too wise to take himself too 
seriously; for want of habitual valets, perhaps, he was no hero 
in his own mind. "I was listening/' he wrote thirty years 
ago, on the day after a dinner in honor of his seventieth birth- 
day, — "I was listening to my own praises for two hours last 
night, and have hardly got used to the discovery of how great 
a man I am." If he had ever got used to it, he could hardly 
have been so gladly remembered as we remember him now 
wherever our language is spoken. He would not have been 
himself if he had not been saturated with the traditions 
native to that New England which through most of his life- 
time still remained one of the two most indelibly native regions 
in our United States. He could not have been so saturated if 
there had not adhered to his shoulder a few such chips as he 
whittled when he discoursed "On a Certain Condescension in 
Foreigners ;" nor yet if the quintessence of our nativity had 
not been distilled into such lines as: 



"O strange New World, that yit wast never young, 
Whose youth from thee by gripin' need was wrung, 
Brown foundlin' of the woods, whose baby-bed 
Was prowled roun' by the Injuns' cracklin' tread, 
An' who grew'st strong thru shifts an' wants an' pains, 
Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains, 
Who saw in vision their young Ishmel strain 
With each hard hand a vassal ocean's mane, 



L 5i J 

Thou, skilled by Freedom an' by gret events 

To pitch new States ez Old-World men pitch tents, 

Thou, taught by fate to know Jehovah's plan 

That men's devices can't unmake a man, 

An' whose free latch-string never was drawed in 

Against the poorest child of Adam's kin, — 

The grave's not dug where traitor hands shall lay 

In fearful haste thy murdered corse away." 

There was never plainer speech to England than he uttered in 
the letter preliminary to the Biglow Paper where this passage 
occurs, and in the more generally remembered verse with which 
the Paper ends: 

"The South says 'Poor folks down !* John, 

An' 'All men up /' say we, — 
White, yaller, black, an' brown, John: 

Now which is your idee? 
Ole Uncle S. sez he, 'I guess 

John preaches wal,' sez he: 
' But, sermon thru, and come to du, 

Why, there's the old J. B. 
A crowdin' you and me!' 



"God means to make this land, John, 

Clear thru, from sea to sea, 
Believe an' understand, John, 

The wuth o' bein' free. 
Ole Uncle S. sez he, T guess 

God's price is high,' sez he; 
'But nothin' else than wut He sells 

Wears long, an' thet J. B. 
May Iarn, like you an' me'." 



Yet England welcomed him. Ancestrally he was hers, just 
as truly as he was ours; and he kept, beyond most of us, the 
full sturdiness of ancestral English fibre. Our national heart- 
strings have sometimes got a little unstrung; they have been 
apt to growl or to complain before ^Eolian blasts of plain- 
speaking. It was not so with him. For all his Americanism, 
the heart of him stayed stoutly in tune with the brave old 



[ $2] 

heart of England as it has throbbed through the ages. He 
could give strong blows without malice, and take them un- 
resenting. He would not have been himself if his temper had 
not rung true as steel. That vibrant note is not only Ameri- 
can; it is English, too. Once they can hear it amid the trou- 
blous discords of any passing time, Englishmen and Americans 
alike must wonderingly feel how it can ultimately resolve 
discord into harmony. 

A little while ago I recalled how, so lately as 1 877, a Bos- 
tonian, asked in London whether he knew Mr. Lowell, hon- 
estly answered "Which?" Five years later, there could have 
been no such doubt; and such a doubt can hardly occur again. 
The sturdy virtue of the native stock he sprang from will 
long be remembered in New England; alone of its scions, 
though, he chanced to prove its virtue before the eyes of the 
whole English-speaking world. The window which com- 
memorates him at Westminster Abbey is a tribute not to his 
kinsmen or to his countrymen but to him, as he faithfully em- 
bodied kinsmen, and countrymen and kinship — a little more 
than kin even though less than kind. It is a tribute, no doubt, 
like the earlier tributes of Oxford and of Cambridge, to the 
man of letters who so loved the secular literature of our Eng- 
lish language that he has incalculably helped others to love 
it too. It is a tribute, as well, to the public man, fearlessly 
loyal not only to country and to duty, but also to that highest 
of all ideals, Veritas (Truth), which has dwelt in the hearts 
of Harvard men ever since their College shield was adopted, 
when Charles the First was King. Most of all, however, that 
window is a tribute to the man himself, still chief among the 
growing and goodly fellowship of those whose happy lot has 
been to serve America and England alike as international 
friends and interpreters. 

Already, perhaps, the relentless years begin to make him 
seem a thing of the past. Just now, to go no further, the 
spirit of reform seems at least for the while recklessly impa- 
tient of such balancing sense of tradition as kept him, a life- 



[53] 

long reformer, loyal to that which is precious in the past; 
the spirit of letters seems vulgarized, sensualized, brutalized; 
the spirit of democracy no longer seems quite consonant with 
that of freedom; and American nationality seems to have 
forgotten that there has ever been or that there can ever be 
such a thing as traditional American nativity. America, we 
are told incessantly and everywhere, must come to be some- 
thing else than America has been. So it must, for better or 
for worse, in almost all aspects but one. In one, and not the 
least important, however, it may grow to be more like an- 
cestral New England than may now seem quite imaginable. 
At this moment, few of our countrymen find themselves living 
where their fathers lived before them; and millions are either 
foreign by birth or at farthest the own children of foreigners. 
Here the generations and the centuries must slowly but surely 
do their work. In a hundred years more, there will be count- 
less multitudes, all the way from sea to sea, who shall have 
known no other home than that where their native eyes opened, 
and to whom tales of the lands or of the regions whence their 
fathers came shall mean hardly more than is meant to any 
modern by the glory that was Greece or the grandeur that was 
Rome. When this time comes, Americans, no matter what 
their origin, must inevitably find themselves in one respect 
akin to Lowell as few can be yet; for both in the flesh and in 
the spirit they will never have known any native country but 
their own, which is ours. That country will be English- 
speaking, and thus, like ourselves, imbued with old English 
tradition. What its people will be like we cannot tell, nor 
live to know. There is room, though, for faith that the new 
native America shall prove in a thousand ways its American 
fellowship with the old. If so, there is ground for hope that 
the native New England of the past has fulfilled a mission now 
unsuspected, foretelling and foreshadowing the native America 
of the future. 

"It is possible," wrote Cotton Mather, "that our Lord 
Jesus Christ carried some thousands of Reformers into the 



[54] 

retirements of an American desert, on purpose that, with an 
opportunity granted unto many of his faithful servants to 
enjoy the precious liberty of their Ministry, though in the 
midst of many temptations all their days, He might there, 
to them first, and then by them, give a specimen of many good 
things which He would have His Churches elsewhere aspire 
and arise unto; and this being done, He knows whether there 
be not all done, that New England was planted for; and 
whether the Plantation may not, soon after this, come to 
nothing.' ' Lowell, I think, never quite gave Cotton Mather 
his due; and surely would no more have subscribed than we 
to the literal doctrine here set forth. Yet the spirit of that 
doctrine is living still, and not least because Lowell was among 
those who cherished it. Creeds are temporal things; but the 
truth they strive to imprison in words is eternal. The 
Churches of Mather's time are dead and gone; so, in many 
aspects, is the traditional Democracy of New England on 
which Lowell based hope for constant betterment of earthly 
existence. New England herself no longer looms large in the 
perspective of American nationality; before long she may sink 
beyond the scope of any but retrospective sight. Whether 
or no, so long as the changing old order still yields place to 
new, instead of to chaos, we may humbly believe that the 
many ways in which God shall fulfil Himself will stay multi- 
tudinously and inexhaustibly incorrupt. AH He demands is 
unswerving faith in the truth of righteousness. 

Unless I am all wrong, those of us who years ago absorbed 
the spirit of Lowell's teaching can never quite lose this abiding 
faith, ancestral to England, ancestral to New England, and 
glowing now beneath the crust material of life both in our 
Mother Country and among our American selves. If so, 
even though he might not have acknowledged the letter of his 
teaching in such form as it has assumed with me after the 
glossing experience of more than forty years, I can hardly 
doubt that he would have recognized its spirit. Since New 
England was founded, England has had two Civil Wars; 



[55] 

and so has America. The Civil War of the Seventeenth Cen- 
tury was purely English; and long ago the discords of Cava- 
liers and Roundheads have been forgotten in the renewed 
spiritual kinship which reverences the loyalty both of Charles 
asserting the rights of Englishmen and of Cromwell asserting 
the might of England. The Civil War of the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury was purely American; and already it begins to be for- 
gotten in the spiritual kinship which gladly counts among the 
heroes of our country both Lincoln and Lee. The Civil War 
of the Eighteenth Century was common to England and 
America; and by calling it a Revolution we have disguised 
to this day the fact that it hardly disturbed, even among 
ourselves, the diuturnity of our Common Law. Truly, how- 
ever, this law, like the language in which it speaks and the 
literature which makes that language deathless, stays com- 
mon to England and to America alike; so, for all their persis- 
tent or recurrent discords, nothing can destroy the spiritual 
kinship of England and America until our living tongue shall 
have stiffened into the marble rigidity of classic changelessness. 
Therefore, as at last we are beginning to know and to feel, 
we can both be our own best selves only when we strive 
towards truth and righteousness not apart but together. 
So even already, for such as will believe, Lowell is the prophet 
of a peace which, God willing, shall pass all understanding. 

And yet, so long as any of us who knew him linger living, 
whether across seas or here, this can never be quite the whole 
story. Rather our last thought, like our first, must be of the 
man himself, as he lived and moved and had his being. Noth- 
ing can quite replace the magic of his presence; and yet as he 
wrote of Louis Agassiz : 

"His magic was not far to seek, — 
He was so human ! " 






MR. ALFRED NOYES 

Chancellor Sloane: Mr. Alfred Noyes made a confession to 
me yesterday, which I take the liberty of repeating, although 
it may violate the confessional. He said: " When I return in 
a short time to my own dear native land, I am going to be 
a little, and perhaps a great deal, homesick. " He has be- 
come in a way one of us, and he is to favor us by reading 
two of his poems. 

Mr. Noyes: The first poem which I am to read was sug- 
gested by that wonderful spectacle on Fifth Avenue during 
the Fourth Liberty Loan campaign, when the flags of all the 
nations were displayed. It had its origin one night when 
the avenue was somewhat deserted and the west wind came 
blowing along, tossing those flags, and suggested, as it has 
always suggested in English poetry, the "Birth of the 
English Spirit. " 

"THE AVENUE OF THE ALLIES"* 

This is the song of the wind as it came 
Tossing the flags of the nations to flame: 

J am the breath of God. I am His laughter. 
I am His Liberty. That is my name. 

So it descended, at night, on the city. 

So it went lavishing beauty and pity, 

Lighting the lordliest street of the world 

With half of the banners that earth has unfurled; 

* Reproduced by permission from "The New Morning," by Alfred Noyes. 
Copyright, 1918, by Alfred Noyes. Copyright, 1919, by Frederick A. Stokes 
Company. 

[56] 



I 57 I 

Over the lamps that are brighter than stars. 
Laughing aloud on its way to the wars, 
Proud as America, sweeping along 
Death and destruction like notes in a song, 
Leaping to battle as man to his mate, 
Joyous as God when he moved to create, — 

Never was voice of a nation so glorious, 
Glad of its cause and afire with its fate! 
Never did eagle on mightier pinion 
Tower to the height of a brighter dominion, 
Kindling the hope of the prophets to flame, 
Calling aloud on the deep as it came, 

Cleave me a way for an army with banners. 
I am His Liberty. That is my name. 

Know you the meaning of all they are doing? 
Know you the light that their soul is pursuing? 
Know you the might of the world they are making, 
This nation of nations whose heart is awaking? 
What is this mingling of peoples and races? 
Look at the wonder and joy in their faces ! 
Look how the folds of the union are spreading! 
Look, for the nations are come to their wedding. 
How shall the folk of our tongue be afraid of it? 
England was born of it. England was made of it, 
Made of this welding of tribes into one, 
This marriage of pilgrims that followed the sun! 
Briton and Roman and Saxon were drawn 
By winds of this Pentecost, out of the dawn, 
Westward, to make her one people of many; 
But here is a union more mighty than any. 
Know you the soul of this deep exultation? 
Know you the word that goes forth to this nation? 

I am the breath of God. I am His Liberty. 
Let there be light over all his creation. 



[58] 

Over this Continent, wholly united, 

They that were foemen in Europe are plighted. 

Here, in a league that our blindness and pride 

Doubted and flouted and mocked and denied, 

Dawns the Republic, the laughing, gigantic 

Europe, united, beyond the Atlantic. 

That is America, speaking one tongue, 

Acting her epics before they are sung, 

Driving her rails from the palms to the snow, 

Through States that are greater than Emperors know, 

Forty-eight States that are empires in might, 

But ruled by the will of one people tonight, 

Nerved as one body, with net-works of steel, 

Merging their strength in the one Commonweal, 

Brooking no poverty, mocking at Mars, 

Building their cities to talk with the stars. 

Thriving, increasing by myriads again 

Till even in numbers old Europe may wane. 

How shall a son of the England they fought 

Fail to declare the full pride of his thought, 

Stand with the scoffers who, year after year, 
Bring the Republic their half-hidden sneer? 
Now, as in beauty she stands at our side, 
Who shall withhold the full gift of his pride? 
Not the great England who knows that her son, 
Washington, fought her, and Liberty won. 
England, whose names like the stars in their station, 
Stand at the foot of that world's Declaration, — 
Washington, Livingston, Langdon, she claims them, 
It is her right to be proud when she names them, 
Proud of that voice in the night as it came, 
Tossing the flags of the nations to flame: 

I am the breath oj God. I am His laughter. 
I am His Liberty. That is my name. 



[59] 

Flags, in themselves, are but rags that are dyed. 
Flags, in that wind, are like nations enskied. 
See, how they grapple the night as it rolls 
And trample it under like triumphing souls. 
Over the city that never knew sleep, 
Look at the riotous folds as they leap. 

Thousands of tri-colors, laughing for France, 
Ripple and whisper and thunder and dance; 
Thousands of flags for Great Britain aflame 
Answer their sisters in Liberty's name. 
Belgium is burning in pride overhead. 
Poland is near, and her sunrise is red. 
Under and over, and fluttering between, 
Italy burgeons in red, white, and green. 
See, how they climb like adventurous flowers, 
Over the tops of the terrible towers. . . . 
There, in the darkness, the glories are mated. 
There, in the darkness, a world is created. 
There, in this Pentecost, streaming on high. 
There, with a glory of stars in the sky. 
There the broad flag of our union and liberty 
Rides the proud night-wind and tyrannies die. 



Mr. Noyes: The next lines were suggested by the memo- 
rial service which was held in New York after the armistice 
was signed. The most impressive feature of that service, as 
I remember it, was the Funeral March, during which every- 
one stood. 



VICTORY * 

(Written after the British Service at Trinity Church, New York.) 

I 

Before those golden altar-lights we stood, 
Each one of us remembering his own dead. 

A more than earthly beauty seemed to brood 

On that hushed throng, and bless each bending head. 

Beautiful on that gold, the deep-sea blue 

Of those young seamen, ranked on either side, 

Blent with the khaki, while the silence grew 

Deep, as for wings — oh, deep as England's pride. 

Beautiful on that gold, two banners rose — 
Two flags that told how Freedom's realm was made, 

One fair with stars of hope, and one that shows 
The glorious cross of England's long crusade; 

Two flags, now joined, till that high will be done 
Which sent them forth to make the whole world one. 



II 

There were no signs of joy that eyes could see. 

Our hearts were all three thousand miles away. 
There were no trumpets blown for victory. 

A million dead were calling us that day. 

And eyes grew blind, at times; but grief was deep, 
Deeper than any foes or friends have known; 

* Reproduced by permission from "The New Morning," by Alfred Noyes. 
Copyright, 1918, by Alfred Noyes. Copyright, 1919, by Frederick A. Stokes 
Company. 

[60] 



[61 ] 

For oh, my country's lips are locked to keep 
Her bitterest loss her own, and all her own. 

Only the music told what else was dumb, 
The funeral march to which our pulses beat; 

For all our dead went by, to a muffled drum. 
We heard the tread of all those phantom feet. 

Yes. There was victory ! Deep in every soul. 
We heard them marching to their unseen goal. 

Ill 

There, once again, we saw the Cross go by, 

The Cross that fell with all those glorious towers, 

Burnt black in France or mocked on Calvary, 
Till — in one night — the crosses rose like flowers, 

Legions of small white crosses, mile on mile, 

Pencilled with names that had outfought all pain, 

Where every shell-torn acre seems to smile — 
Who shall destroy the cross that rose again ? 

Out of the world's Walpurgis, where hope perished, 
Where all the forms of faith in ruin fell, 

Where every sign of heaven that earth had cherished 
Shrivelled among the lava-floods of hell, 

The eternal Cross that conquers might with right 
Rose like a star to lead us through the night. 

IV 

How shall the world remember? Men forget: 
Our dead are all too many even for Fame! 

Man's justice kneels to kings, and pays no debt 
To those who never courted her acclaim. 



[62] 

Cheat not your heart with promises to pay 

For gifts beyond all price so freely given. 
Where is the heart so rich that it can say 

To those who mourn, "I will restore your heaven"? 

But these, with their own hands, laid up their treasure 
Where never an emperor can break in and steal, 

Treasure for those that loved them past all measure 
In those high griefs that earth can never heal, 

Proud griefs, that walk on earth, yet gaze above, 
Knowing that sorrow is but remembered love. 

V 

Love that still holds us with immortal power, 

Yet cannot lift us to His realm of light; 
Love that still shows us heaven for one brief hour 

Only to daunt the heart with that sheer height; 

Love that is made of loveliness entire 

In form and thought and act; and still must shame us 
Because we ever acknowledge and aspire, 

And yet let slip the shining hands that claim us. 

Oh, if this Love might cloak with rags His glory, 
Laugh, eat and drink, and dwell with suffering men, 

Sit with us at our hearth, and hear our story, 

This world — we thought — might be transfigured then. 

"But oh," Love answered, with swift human tears, 
"All these things have I done, these many years." 

VI 

"This day," Love said, "if ye will hear my voice, 
I mount and sing with birds in all your skies. 



[6 3 ] 

I am the soul that calls you to rejoice, 
And every wayside flower is my disguise. 

"Look closely. Are the wings too wide for pity? 

Look closely. Do these tender hues betray? 
How often have I sought my Holy City? 

How often have ye turned your hearts away? 

"Is there not healing in the beauty I bring you? 

Am I not whispering in green leaves and rain, 
Singing in all that woods and seas can sing you? 

Look, once, on Love, and earth is heaven again. 

"Oh, did your Spring but once a century waken, 
The heaven of heavens for this would be forsaken.' 1 



VII 

There's but one gift that all our dead desire, 
One gift that men can give, and that's a dream, 

Unless we, too, can burn with that same fire 
Of sacrifice — die to the things that seem; 

Die to the little hatreds; die to greed; 

Die to the old ignoble selves we knew; 
Die to the base contempts of sect and creed, 

And rise again, like these, with souls as true. 

Nay (since these died before their task was finished) 
Attempt new heights, bring even their dreams to birth: 

Build us that better world, oh, not diminished 
By one true splendor that they planned on earth. 

And that's not done by sword, or tongue, or pen, 
There's but one way. God make us better men. 



Chancellor Sloane : When one of these noted wits [indicat- 
ing two officers of The Pilgrims] turned to Professor Leacock 
yesterday and said to him that he had impoverished himself 
in the purchase of his books, we quite understood that, 
behind the mask of his mirth, there was the professor. I 
introduce to you Professor Stephen Leacock. 

PROFESSOR STEPHEN BUTLER LEACOCK 

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: Since I have the 
chance to do what I know many of you would like to do, if 
you were standing here in my place, may I first turn and 
express to Mr. Noyes our appreciation of the very wonderful 
and stirring verses that he has just read to us? I wish I 
had written them myself. 

You do me, Mr. Chancellor, a very great honor in asking 
me to speak here today, and in attaching to my name a great 
distinction in the words, "of Canada." But I could have 
wished that some better eloquence than mine might have 
been brought into service to express the kind of thoughts that 
I want to convey to you upon such a momentous occasion as 
this. 

We are here gathered together today to honor the memory 
of James Russell Lowell, a man whose name is a household 
word, whose books are household treasures on both sides of 
the Atlantic. This would have been a good thing to do, even 
if we had not had the experience of the last four years of war. 
But you all know and you all feel from the sense of this gather- 
ing that such celebrations as this have acquired a new signifi- 
cance after the experience we have gone through. We are 
beginning to crown anew the heads of the men of literature, 
all of them from Shakespeare on down to our own time, whose 

[6 4 ] 



[65] 

books are the common gift and heritage of the people of 
Britain and America. They shine for us with a new light, — 
the light of our Anglo-Saxon unity. 

We have made all too much in history of our political 
quarrels. We have been, as British and American people, 
rather apt to put out the worst side of ourselves for our neigh- 
bors to look at. We may sometimes have misled them. I 
am told that it is historically recorded that the years 1776 to 
1 783 were years during which the outside world really thought 
that we were having an actual war. Not at all. A difference 
of opinion was being settled in the only way that English- 
men and Americans have ever been able to settle their dif- 
ferences of opinion. And, though it left behind it much con- 
troversy, the result on the whole was momentous for the his- 
tory of the world. We do not, up in Canada, draw our blinds 
against the sunlight on the Fourth of July. We throw them 
wide open and we like to think that from that Declaration of 
Independence there sprang the mother republic for the re- 
publics of all the world to pattern themselves upon, and that 
we, none the less, partly through the reaction of it, have been 
able to found for all the world to see, an imperial democracy 
built like yours upon the common principles of freedom. 

I say that we have made too much of our quarrels in the 
past. We have heard too much of our Oregon disputes, and 
our "Fifty-four- Forty or Fight," and our other differences of 
opinion, of our dispute during your civil war, and of the sorry 
controversy that might have plunged us into war over the 
jungles and mud-flats of Venezuela. We know now that, 
when the test comes, we stand or fall together. And that has 
not been done by any work of diplomacy or by the operations 
of courts or ambassadors, but because we have something that 
is infinitely greater in common than that, — a common his- 
tory and literature, and the aspirations that lie behind them 
and are the basis of our English and American literature. 
What nobler thing can you find for the boys and girls of a 
nation to be brought up on than the literature of English 



[66] 

school boys and English childhood? What nobler influence 
will you find than these somewhat despised products of our 
Victorian age? I know but little of the literature of Germany, 
still less of that of Austria or Turkey. Nor do I want to know 
anything more of them than I know now. But I suspect 
this, — that if you were to take from the literature of Germany 
the verbose and abstract windiness which comprises the 
philosophy of that people, you would find in it nothing that 
would compare with the splendid bedrock, the magnificent and 
noble aspirations upon which the literature of England and 
America have been built. 

And this, may I say, too? I come to you here as one of 
the representatives of Canada, and we could form for our- 
selves no nobler name, no better insignia of citizenship, be it 
said with all reverence to you English and American people, 
than that which we have. There was a time when that was 
not so. There was a time when we in Canada were thinking 
much upon ourselves and wondering what our path in life 
should be. We seemed to be something greater than a colony, 
and something less than a nation, and in a certain sense we 
were inclined to envy you, and you, perhaps, in all kindliness, 
to look down upon us as a somewhat lower order of men. That 
day is past. The last four years have given their memorials 
to a new pride on which to base our citizenship. The poppies 
that blow in Flanders Fields have carried back to us from our 
dead poet who wrote of them and from those who lie there 
buried beside him, a message of union and citizenship for all 
time. We in Canada are now able to reach out our hands 
to you in a way that never could be done before; and we 
can dismiss all idea of the possibility of our being swallowed 
up, or overshadowed in the sunshine of your greatness. Even 
in the cold light of our northern Aurora Borealis, we can 
walk with upright head, and, in this community of peoples 
of which we speak, we in Canada, humble though we are, 
may perhaps maintain a peculiar position of our own, some- 
thing between the English and Americans — I will not say, 



[6 7 ] 

combining the virtues of both, — I will not say that, but we 
Canadians are at liberty to think it, if we like. 

There is much talk in our time of a League of Nations, 
and I suppose, since the senator from Idaho is not here today, 
it may be mentioned. We have all been perplexed and sur- 
prised to find how a League of Nations is in danger of dis- 
solving, as Sir Herbert Stephen describes it, into a League of 
Dreams, and we are all wondering how it can be bound fast 
and how the clauses could be so written that they will hold 
against strife, and it seems after all as if one must come to the 
conclusion that we can only base it upon the bedrock of the 
natural sympathies that exist between the great nations of 
the world, between ourselves and yourselves and between us 
both and the people of France. Upon that, and that alone, 
can you found the permanent covenant of the League of 
Nations. 

For that, what can contribute more than the kind of 
celebrations we have been holding here, and the kind of sen- 
timent we have been expressing, and the kind of good fellow- 
ship that I feel we have all been pledging toward one another 
now and forever more. 



Chancellor Sloane : There is another great capital of the 
West, as well as of the North and East, and from that comes 
to us one of the members of the Institute, lawyer, writer, 
poet. Mr. Edgar Lee Masters will read a memorial to this 
anniversary and a tribute to England which he has written 
for this occasion. 

MR. EDGAR LEE MASTERS 

MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE 

THE TIE 

If heaven had meant we should be enemies, 
Though from your loins, England, we had sprung, 
It had not made us so by severing seas, 
But cursed our converse with a different tongue. 

We brought your language with us, if we speak 
Your language with a drawl or nasal twang, 
We mould it boldly as we live and seek; 
Some words of Shakespeare in his time were slang. 

If you have spread your glory in the world 
Your navy was of use, perhaps your sword. 
But long ago your banner had been furled 
Save for the conquest of your written word. 

In this we share. The man we celebrate, 
At Birmingham spoke in an utterance clear 
Of hopes for which we stand the advocate, 
The freedom that our common hearts revere. 

[68] 



[69] 

You taught us words to write a lasting charter: 
What people now impugn its sacred worth? 
A world republic of free thought and barter 
Was sketched in English on July the fourth. 

It was the very year your Adam Smith 
Wrote down a merchant culture for mankind. 
The new day asks us to put by the myth 
Of gold alone that keeps the nations blind. 

New Zealand and the courts of every power, 
America, Australia, Canada 
In English talk the business of the hour, 
Take counsel in its literature and law. 

This is the backbone of a League of Peace. 
Nations we keep as houses, if you will, 
To which for private talk we have release 
From market places where we match our skill. 

There may be Leagues of Nations — they must rest 
On words of understanding, not decrees. 
We cannot bring together East and West 
Except as equals, as democracies. 

Your noble spirits have not failed as yet 
To honor Washington and Lincoln too, 
We still remember you did not forget 
To give Walt Whitman at the first his due. 

And thus I speak, because your sons of light 
Join with us in this tribute to a man 
Who kept the flame of duty pure and bright — 
Lowell, who sensed the faith American. 



[70] 

He helped to bring us closer, make us friends. 
But if we would be closer, wholly free, 
We must resolve the problem which transcends 
All other problems, that of poverty. 

We should not have it with us. As for you, 
Something remains with you of gavelkind. 
Uproot it, and we promise, if you do, 
To try to rid us of the village mind. 

When Lowell lived we had the literal whip, 
Chains tangible, the rule of ignorant blood. 
Our task is greater. Oh, for fellowship 
To extirpate the things for which they stood. 

Insatiate rules and laws tyrannical 

Are chains no less! Come, soldiers from the war, 

And help us in our task political, 

Destroy the banal gardens we abhor; 

Your fathers from our civil war returned, 
As from a kiln, vessels for us to see 
The emblem of the Union on them burned. 
Come to us with the word of Liberty. 

The war has sent us running here and there. 
Some foolish feet may stumble in the quest 
Over forgotten books of heart's despair 
With wisdom sealed, too many years at rest, 

Kicked by a casual foot, perhaps inspired, 

A thing of powder for an ancient code. 

It will be well if what we have desired 

Is lighted us by thoughts which don't explode. 



I 71 ] 

These treasured spirits treasured up for us 
Wait for release — the time is now at hand 
To take them from their prisons dolorous — 
Do justice to the poor, and free the land. 

Milton and Langland, Shelley, Mill and Locke, 
Whitman and Lincoln, Lowell, living souls, 
Point to the world's great federation clock 
Which clicks the thrilling minutes ere it tolls. 



Chancellor Sloane: Ladies and gentlemen, there are some 
men who pronounce a benediction, and there are also others 
who not only do that, but are themselves a benediction, 
and these proceedings will be brought to a close by such a 
man, Mr. Crothers. 

DR. SAMUEL Mc CHORD CROTHERS 

MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE 

The words of our chairman remind me of one of my 
first experiences as a college preacher at Harvard, where the 
college preacher, after the morning chapel, meets any of the 
students who come to talk with him. My only visitor came 
in very hastily, and he said: "Mr. Crothers, I wanted to say 
that I liked your benediction." Then he left. 

At the close of this meeting, I feel that we want to par- 
ticularly emphasize one side of Mr. Lowell that is of especial 
interest to us at this time. He was not merely a man of 
letters. He was a patriot and a reformer. He was pro- 
foundly concerned in all movements that aimed at better 
relations between nations. He would have rejoiced to take 
part in the work of to-day. A number of years ago a college 
professor, then of little note, wrote a delightful volume of 
essays, which was a flat failure from the publisher's point of 
view, and I am told that the reason that the public did not 
take to it enthusiastically lay in the title, which was "Mere 
Literature. ,, People said, "We don't know who this Woodrow 
Wilson is, and if he is only talking about mere literature, it 
is no use for us earnest Americans to buy his books." The 
public was slow to appreciate the irony in the title. If it 
had taken the trouble to read the book, it would have learned 
that the author did not believe that literature could be dis- 

[72] 



[73 ] 

connected from human interests and the great movements of 
humanity. Heine declared that he did not wish to be re- 
membered merely as a poet, but as a soldier in the battle for 
the liberation of humanity. 

There is a stricter sect of literary people who look upon 
any infusion of purpose in literature as a high crime and misde- 
meanor. They look upon it as a sort of an adulteration of 
the purity of literature that ought to come under the notice 
of the Pure Food and Drug Law. It happens that the group 
of poets and men of letters to which Lowell belonged, although 
they might have sometimes proclaimed this doctrine, never 
practised it. Emerson wrote, "A new commandment gave 
the smiling Muse: Thou shalt not preach. ,, But the smile 
of the Muse must have been very ironical as she looked upon 
her New England votaries. Preaching was a part of their 
nature. 

Lowell belonged to this group of born preachers. He was 
at his best when he was the spokesman of a cause, and if the 
cause were unpopular the appeal was all the greater. There 
were three great causes into which he threw all the energy of 
his nature. Two of these succeeded gloriously in his lifetime. 
The triumph of the last great cause was delayed. 

The first cause was that of Anti-Slavery. In the first 
enthusiasm of youth he hailed it as 

"God's new Messiah, 
Offering each the bloom or blight." 

Here was the choice between darkness and light. 

After a time he took up the cause of the Union in the 
same whole-hearted way. Lowell stood with Lincoln and 
interpreted him to the people. At the close of the Civil 
War the Commemoration Ode expressed the high mood of 
the triumphant nation. 

But in the two decades that followed, a period of dis- 
appointment when American idealists were on the defensive, 
Henry Adams tells of the way in which the reformers strug- 



[74 ] 

gled against the wave of materialism which seemed about to 
destroy all that they had struggled for. They were con- 
sciously out of sympathy with the new conditions that had 
suddenly developed. They were trying to reform society 
without really understanding the forces that had suddenly 
come into play. Lowell felt this bewilderment. He expresses 
it in "The CathedraI. ,, Standing in the Cathedral of 
Chartres, he thinks of the difference between the simplicity 
of mediaeval religion and the complexity and vulgarity of the 
American life that confronts him. He confesses that he is 
himself "the born disciple of an elder time." He loves the 
ancient sanctities and feels the necessity of an established 
order. But intellectually he is convinced that the new order 
is inevitable. He believes in Democracy, yet he fears it. 

"Worst is not yet: Io, where his coming looms, 
Of Earth's anarchic children latest born, 
Democracy." 

This Western giant 

"Scorning refinements which he lacks himself" 

will destroy much which he may be unable to replace. 

"How save the ark, 
Or holy of holies, unprofaned a day 
From his unscrupulous curiosity 
That handles everything as if to buy, 
Tossing aside what fabrics delicate 
Suit not the rough-and-tumble of his ways? 
What hope for those fine-nerved humanities 
That made earth gracious once with gentler arts, 
Now the rude hands have caught the trick of thought 
And claim an equal suffrage with the brain?" 

Lowell admired the backwoodsman who, meeting Caesar, 
"would slap his back, call him 'Old Horse,' and challenge to 
a drink." He was democratic enough to like to see some one 
do that to Caesar, but he was not democratic enough to enjoy 
having somebody do it to him. 



I 75 1 

During the latter years of his life there were many notes 
of discouragement, as he watched the progress of American 
life. He shared the discouragements which came to all the 
reformers of his period. And yet during what was, in many 
respects, a dark period for the idealist he not only fought a 
good fight but he kept the faith in democracy. It was the 
faith that in spite of their lapses into materialistic habits of 
mind the American people could be trusted to rise to the level 
of the noblest opportunity. 

In "The Faerie Queene" Spenser pictures the meeting of 
Sir Artegall, or Justice, with Sir Calidore, or Courtesy. Sir 
Artegall asks the nature of the quest, and the other answers : 

"The Blatant Beast, quoth he, I doe pursue 
And through the world incessantly doe chase 

Till I him overtake or else subdue; 

Yet know I not or how or in what place 

To find him out; yet still I forward trace." 

James Russell Lowell was one who continually chased the 
Blatant Beast which was ravaging the world. He was the 
foe of all that was ugly and sordid in our American life. 
And I know of no one who would have more delighted in the 
noble opportunity that confronts our nation to-day. 



SUPPLEMENTARY EVENTS 



REPRESENTATION OF "WASHINGTON" AT 
THE THEATRE DU VIEUX COLOMBIER 

On the 20th of February, in compliment to the Academy 
and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, its parent 
organization, and to their guests, and in honor of the birthday 
of Washington, Monsieur Jacques Copeau, Director-General 
of the Theatre du Vieux Colombier, of New York, courteously 
gave a special matinee performance of the play of "Wash- 
ington," by Mr. Percy MacKaye, a member of the Institute. 
Following is the programme, including La Fontaine's "La 
Coupe Enchantee:" 



[77] 



[ 78] 



WASHINGTON— (THE MAN WHO MADE US) 

FIRST HALF 
Induction — by Percy MacKaye. Translated into French by Jacques Copeau 

Part II: At Chateau-Thierry 

The Tragic Mask Robert Bogaert 

The Comic Mask Marcel Millet 

The Theatre Louis Jouvet 

La Coupe Enchant£e— By La Fontaine 

Anselme Robert Bogaert 

Lelie Jean Sarment 

Josselin Louis Jouvet 

Bertrand Lucien Weber 

M. Griffon Marcel Millet 

M. Tobie Robert Casa 

Luctnde Jeannine Bresanges 

Thibaut Romain Bouquet 

Perrette Renne Bouquet 

Entr'acte 

Prologue to Washington 

By Percy MacKaye— translated into French by Jacques Copeau 

The Tragic Mask Robert Bogaert 

The Comic Mask Marcel Millet 

The Theatre Louis Jouvet 

Quilloquon, a Singer of Ballads Lucien Weber 

Inhibitors, A Little Boy, A Little Girl 

Transitional Ballad (sung by Quilloquon), "Down by the Cold Hillsidey" 

WASHINGTON 

A Dramatic Action — by Percy MacKaye 
Translated into French by Pierre de Lanux. Scene designed by Robert Edmond Jones 

Washington Jacques Copeau 

Marquis de la Fayette Jean Sarment 

Alexander Hamilton Henri Dhurtal 

Thomas Paine Marcel Millet 

Baron von Steuben Robert Casa 

Count Pulaski Emile Chifolian 

Billy, Negro Servant Romain Bouquet 

A Post Boy (Quilloquon) Lucien Weber 

Soldiers 

Scene: Interior of Washington's Tent, Valley Forge. Time: Winter of 1776 



LUNCHEON BY THE PILGRIMS 

On the 2 1 st of February The Pilgrims gave a luncheon 
to the English, Canadian, and Australian guests of the 
Academy at the Union League Club, at which were present 
many representative men of New York. Mr. George T. 
Wilson, Vice-President of The Pilgrims, presided, and the other 
speakers were: Sir H. Babington Smith, K. C. B., C. S. I., 
Acting High Commissioner of Great Britain; Professor 
Stephen Butler Leacock, Henry G. Braddon, High Commis- 
sioner for Australia; John Drew, Job E. Hedges, and Patrick 
Francis Murphy. 

Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson, Permanent Secretary 
of the Academy, read the following extracts from his Ode, 
entitled " Hands Across Sea:" 

HANDS ACROSS SEA 

[1899] 

England, thou breeder of heroes and of bards, 

Had ever nation manlier shield or song! 

For thee such rivalry have sword and pen, 

Fame, from her heaped green, crowns with equal hand 

The deathless deed and the immortal word. 

For which dost thou thy Sidney hold more dear, 

Defense of England or of Poesie? 

Cromwell or Milton — if man's guiding stars 

Could vanish as they came — which wouldst thou spare? 

Lost Kempenfelt indeed, were Cowper mute! 

To victory, not alone on shuddering seas 

Rode Nelson, but on Campbell's tossing rhyme. 

Hark to thy great Duke's greater dirge, and doubt 

For which was Waterloo the worthier won, 

To change the tyrant on a foreign throne, 

Or add a faultless ode to English song. 



[ 8o] 

Great deeds make poets: by whose nobler word, 
In turn, the blood of heroes is transfused 
Into the veins of sluggards, till they rise, 
Surprised, exalted to the height of men. 

Nor can Columbia choose between the two 
Which give more glory to thy Minster gloom. 
They are our brave, our deathless, our divine — 
Our Saxon grasp on their embattled swords, 
Our Saxon numbers in their lyric speech. 
We grudge no storied wreath, nay, would withhold 
Of bay or laurel not one envied leaf. 



To-day, not moved by memory or fear, 

But by the vision of a nobler time, 

Millions cry toward thee in a passion of peace. 

We need thee, England, not in armed array 

To stand beside us in the empty quarrels 

That kings pursue, ere War itself expire 

Like an o'er-armored knight in desperate lunge 

Beneath the weight of helmet and of lance; 

But now, in conflict with an inner foe 

Who shall in conquering either conquer both. 

For it is written in the book of fate: 

By no sword save her own falls Liberty, 

A wondrous century trembles at its dawn, 

Conflicting currents telling its approach; 

And while men take new reckonings from the peaks, 

Reweigh the jewel and retaste the wine, 

Be ours to guard against the impious hands 

That, like rash children, tamper with that blade. 

Thou, too, hast seen the vision: shall it be 

Only a dream, caught in the web of night, 

Lost through the coarser meshes of the day? 

Or like the beauty of the prismic bow, 

Which the sun's ardor, that creates, consumes? 

Oh, may it be the thing we image it! — 

The beckoning spirit of our common race 

Floating before us in a fringe of light 

With Duty's brow, Love's eyes, the smile of Peace; 

Benignant figure of compelling mien, 

Star-crowned, star-girdled, and o'erstrewn with stars, 

As though a constellation should descend 

To be fit courier to a glorious age. 



LUNCHEON BY THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF 
ARTS AND LETTERS 

Following the literary exercises the National Institute of 
Arts and Letters gave an informal luncheon to the members 
of the Academy and their guests, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. 



The lines that follow, written by one of the Canadian 
guests of the Academy, were published in the press during 
the week of the commemoration: 

ODE ON THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 
BIRTH OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

By Duncan Campbell Scott 

Lift up thine eyes, Sad Earth, 

From contemplation of the years of wrong, 

Shake the last tears away, 

And through thy glistening lashes, 

See how the bright dawn flashes 

On the dark frontiers of another day. 

He who was born a hundred years ago 
Greets thee from out his silence. 
He had his share in that great answer 
Of the million-throated, No! 
To the base plot for Freedom's overthrow; 
All lovers of divinest Liberty 
Were present in that Concord; 
And Lowell's voice, free, 
With the freedom of two nations, 
Vibrated in that trumpet tone: 
How could that soul be alien and alone 
Who nourished Freedom in her direst need? 
Watcher of the world's turbid tide, 
He found our faults; Truth was his only pride, 
But Truth had taken Humour by the hand 
For counsel, that she might better understand. 
His mind was cheered and lit 
By the still silver lamps of elder days; 
He pierced the gloom of many a clinging haze 
With arrows of burning wit; 
He knew that Thought is master of Deed, 
[83] 



[84] 

He dwelt in mansions with the Lords of Thought, 
And by their wisdom we are freed. 

Thought flies before the venture, 

Prompting with lonely impulse 

As it moves and breathes; 

When the deed is fact, 

And Victor-laughter crowns the act, 

Thought heaps the ringing portal 

With the roses and the wreaths; 

When they are old 

Thought summons a few words, 

Clear with light and the songs of birds, 

Graves them on gold — 

The deed is made immortal! 

Come, let us dream the dream 

That Milton and Shelley, 

That Lowell and Whitman dreamed, 

Prompting the Future with our thought; 

Then, when the deed is wrought, 

The thinkers who come after 

Will join their thought with ours 

And crown the event, — 

Liberty justified of her roots and flowers: 

Then we, with silence blent, 

Shall feel the Victor-laughter 

Thrill all our silence, and shall be well content. 



MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 
OF ARTS AND LETTERS 



MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 
OF ARTS AND LETTERS 

The Academy was organized in 1904-5 by the National 
Institute of Arts and Letters. It comprises fifty members, 
who as vacancies occur are elected from the Institute's list 
of two hundred and fifty. 



OFFICERS 

President : Mr. Howells Chancellor : Mr. Sloane 

Treasurer : Mr. Hastings 

Permanent Secretary : Mr. Johnson, 347 Madison Ave., N. Y. 

Directors : Messrs. Butler, French, Hastings, Howells, Johnson, Sloane 



and Thomas 



William Dean Howells 
*Augustus Saint-Gaudens 
*Edmund Clarence Stedman 
*John La Farge 
*SamueI Langhorne Clemens 
*John Hay 
*Edward MacDowell 
*Henry James 
*CharIes FoIIen McKim 
*Henry Adams 
*CharIes Eliot Norton 
*John Quincy Adams Ward 
*Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury 
"Theodore Roosevelt 
*Thomas Bailey Aldrich 
*Joseph Jefferson 

John Singer Sargent 
*Richard Watson Gilder 
*Horace Howard Furness 



*Henry Charles Lea 
Edwin Howland Blashfield 

*WiIIiam Merritt Chase 
Thomas Hastings 

"Hamilton Wright Mabie 

*Bronson Howard 
Brander Matthews 
Thomas Nelson Page 
Elihu Vedder 
George Edward Woodberry 

*WiIIiam Vaughn Moody 

*Kenyon Cox 

George Whitefteld Chadwick 
Abbott Handerson Thayer 

*John Muir 

*CharIes Francis Adams 
Henry Mills Alden 
George deForest Brush 
William Rutherford Mead 



[87] 



[ 88 



*John Bigelow 
*\YinsIo\v Homer 
*CarI Schurz 

* Alfred Thayer Mahan 
*JoeI Chandler Harris 

Daniel Chester French 
John Burroughs 
James Ford Rhodes 
*Edwin Austin Abbey 
Horatio William Parker 
William Milligan Sloane 

* Edward Everett Hale 
Robert Underwood Johnson 
George Washington Cable 

*DanieI Coit Gilman 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson 
*DonaId Grant Mitchell 
*Andrew Dickson White 
Henry van Dyke 
William Crary Brownell 
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve 
*JuIia Ward Howe 
Woodrow Wilson 
Arthur Twining Hadley 
Henry Cabot Lodge 
*Francis Hopkinson Smith 
*Francis Marion Crawford 

[Revised to May 15, 1919] 



*John White Alexander 

Bliss Perry 
*Francis Davis Millet 

Abbott Lawrence Lowell 
Mames Whitcomb Riley 

Nicholas Murray Butler 

Paul Wayland Bartlett 
*George Browne Post 

Owen Wister 

Herbert Adams 

Augustus Thomas 

Timothy Cole 

Cass Gilbert 

William Roscoe Thayer 

Robert Grant 

Frederick MacMonnies 

Julian Alden Weir 

William Gillette 

Paul Elmer More 
*George Lockhart Rives 

Barrett Wendell 

Gari Melchers 

Elihu Root 

Brand Whitlock 

Hamlin Garland 

Paul Shorey 



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